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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7249 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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This story went viral A prediction market user made $436k betting on Maduro's downfall.

A gambler made nearly half a million dollars on the capture of Venezuela's president just before it was officially announced, raising questions about whether someone profited from inside knowledge of the US operation.

Wagers on Polymarket, a crypto-powered platform, that Nicolás Maduro would be out of power by the end of January rose in the hours before President Donald Trump announced on Saturday the Venezuelan leader had been seized.

One account, which joined the platform last month and took four positions, all on Venezuela, made more than $436,000 (£322,000) from a $32,537 bet.

In the comments, one thing I have observed is the willingness of people to defend insider trading. Here is the highest-upvoted comment on Hackr News:

"Using insider information is how you are supposed to win these. Otherwise it's just random gambling. This is not the stock market. There are no public reporting rules for the weather, song lyrics, what Kim Kardashian eats tomorrow."

Does this sound insane to anyone else? Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already? Just create a market about things you know in advance, using proxies and crypto mixers to hide your identity and money trail if needed. An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone. More specifically, shill accounts would create markets pretending to be an outsider, and the employee and his accomplices would place the correct bets leading up to the deadline. Wash trades by accomplices could be placed to create hype and volume to lure unsuspecting traders.

My comments of course were downvoted. They always are. I could make a comment along the lines of the "Pizza tastes great" and I would be downvoted by every pizza hater on that site and no upvotes by everyone else who enjoys pizza, as is the counterintuitive nature of online voting patterns. Writing good comments is an art in and of itself.

it does sound insane that they're allowing something which could potentially compromise national security. The military didn't even tell congress they were doing this, to prevent leaks, but someone apparently put this out there on a public website?

Selfishlly, I wonder if we could take advantage of this. Maybe set up a script that would watch for big, sudden bets on unusual markets from newly created accounts, and then piggy back off of them.

If the feds can get people for rigging poker games, they will find you and catch you doing this if you’re leveraging insider info, even if it’s not a security. But even if they didn’t it’s spiritually bad for you. Lotteries and the like are just a tax on poor people.

I just don’t care if people like Nate Silver make money in gambling markets. It pulls regular people in who lose bad and can’t get out. It is good old fashioned gambling and lucrative bets are out there for every venue. It’s sad to dream of a way out of your middle class life that involves spending the money you do have.

Sportsbooks are solvent despite offering terrible odds. And prediction markets almost always give better odds than the books.

We're fortunate to live in a reality where enough suckers and gambling addicts provide enough incentive for sharps and insiders to come in and provide accurate odds.

Sportsbooks are solvent despite offering terrible odds. And prediction markets almost always give better odds than the books.

IIRC Kalshi doesn't tend to consistently beat the overround on sports of other major books, and that's just over quite a limited array of markets versus what an actual sportsbook will tend to be offering. Polymarket does a bit better but will undoubtedly one day introduce commission unless their plan is to just not have revenue.

Genuine sharps will do fine off the PM model though steamchasing is gonna be difficult on either platform since it's not really contributing any meaningful signal. Insiders 'providing accurate odds' is tricky when the accurate odds for an option are 100%, and in the longterm it's quite likely that the PMs manifest some premium charge equivalent from the old days on betting exchanges to curtail absolutely toxic flow.

I have observed is the willingness of people to defend insider trading

Insider trading is a thing people do on the stock market, which is a completely different thing with a different history and different purposes. If you want to convince me that people using insider knowledge to win at these "gamble on the news" games is a bad thing that I should be opposed to, you have to do it using actual reasons.

but aren't prediction markets also markets? I am not emotionally invested in the outcome of this either, and dumb ppl losing money in the market or from information asymmetries doesn't upset me much. If this is legal, then it's a no brainer to do this at scale like the examples I give in my original post. just set up markets where you know the outcome in advance and hope someone else takes the other end of the trade, or maybe find an employee who has insider information and split the profits or something,

Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already?

The reason, which becomes clear if one looks at the fine print, is that these markets have absolutely pathetic volume. One and a half million dollars on whether Trump will take Greenland. This is probably for the best. If I had a Polymarket account, I would have bet against Maduro being removed from power, and I would have lost my money.

Despite the hype, the smart money on Wall Street is not getting involved.

the Venezuela contract had enough liquidity for someone to book a $400k profit,and I don't think his trades moved the markets much. As prediction markets gain popularity, so will volume.

Does this sound insane to anyone else?

Using congressional insider trading as a rough proxy, the vast majority of people are vehemently against insider trading. People have a knee-jerk reaction to unfairness (caveats abound) and thus insider trading must be prevented. Being a libertarian, I'm much more comfortable with unfairness than the general public.

I think it also creates perverse incentives, especially if you're in a position to choose how to resolve the bet. For example, let's say there is a market for whether Canada will send over $1b to the Ukraine between January 1st - April 30th, 2026. If I'm a Canadian MP, especially one of the ruling party, I can choose how to resolve the market - which means if I decide I earned a bonus, I can look at whatever position has a better payout, bet on that, then delay/accelerate sending aid to make my position true.

The issue becomes that "making money" is a much stronger incentive than "doing the right thing" - so you could take even outlandish positions and bet on them.

"But not everyone has that much power! Most people only know a little bit!"

Well, yes, true, but most people have areas of influence. Not everyone can know whether NVIDIA's new chip will make it to market before Intel - but the employees at NVIDIA could delay, find "faults", etc. in an effort to push the date back.

Insider trading is bad when the people betting on it are also the people who decide which direction it resolves in.

Criticizing insider trading in the stock market is one thing but criticizing it in prediction markets is another. Harnessing insider information is a reason Robin Hansen pioneered the concept of prediction markets.

I think it also creates perverse incentives, especially if you're in a position to choose how to resolve the bet. For example, let's say there is a market for whether Canada will send over $1b to the Ukraine between January 1st - April 30th, 2026. If I'm a Canadian MP, especially one of the ruling party, I can choose how to resolve the market - which means if I decide I earned a bonus, I can look at whatever position has a better payout, bet on that, then delay/accelerate sending aid to make my position true.

Orderbook would be thin for a market like this, your senator would be risking his job and reputation for a measly low 5 figure payout.

Well, yes, true, but most people have areas of influence. Not everyone can know whether NVIDIA's new chip will make it to market before Intel - but the employees at NVIDIA could delay, find "faults", etc. in an effort to push the date back.

Majority of nvidia employees are multimillionaires, especially the ones in position to change timelines. Once again - risking a lot for a relatively small payout.

The conversation about effects of prediction markets on our world are valid, but I think most people overestimate how much of an effect they could have. Polymarket double counts their volume, most markets' orderbooks are thin. Insiders will be getting some peanuts payouts here and there (I personally don't care), smart players like funds have another signal to monitor to be ahead of others. That's really it.

They are thin, but this guy still cashed out a 400k+ profit. Some contracts have pretty big volume and such volume will increase with the popularity of these markets.

We can easily create hypotheticals for people who are not multimillionaires also affecting outcomes for a payout

I guess the question is where does one draw the lines ethically. If I am sitting on information, even something seemingly as trivial as record sales or movie ticket sale, and I trade on this, is this ethical? I don't think so, but I am not going to lose much sleep over it either. It does make markets more efficient in the sense of the price being closer to its appropriate value. But I can see a surge of hacking incidents or hostages as people try to glean insider information that can be traded on prediction markets, instead of sold to hackers or riskier regulated markets.

I understand why utilitarian arguments exist against insider trading, but deontologically I'm having trouble getting to it being unethical.

Any regulation can be rationalized. Burqas are mandated to mitigate lusting after women because lusting after women leads to all kinds of untoward things.

The health of the market relies on the wisdom of crowds, which requires crowds of people to be able to reliably win from it. Insider trading is bad not because in some moral sense "unfairness" is bad, but because if it happens often enough that ordinary people learn that it's unfair they'll stop participating. Prediction markets are zero sum to begin with, so I don't expect them to survive long-term without subsidies, but what life they do have is built by the belief that smart people can earn money from their intuitions. If that fails to be true because insiders keep swooping in and snatching up all the money at the last minute, then fewer non-insiders will participate, and we'll only ever get accurate results when there are insiders.

This would be less catastrophic than if it happened to the stock market, since the death of prediction markets wouldn't ruin us the same way the death of capital investing, but it's still a potentially existential crisis within its demand. This isn't just about people's moral intuitions, there are stakes.

Investing wins long term because of overall market growth, not information disparities. Wisdom of the crowds only works in unbiased markets. The famous examples work unless you shove a bunch of lead weights up the cow's ass or put ping pong balls in the middle of the jar of jelly beans. Insider trading increases accuracy, reducing volatility on net, long term. This is good for long term growth.

Prediction markets are zero sum to begin with, so I don't expect them to survive long-term without subsidies

I'll take that bet /s Gambling is zero sum and is one of the most persistent markets that has ever existed.

WE GOT WEIGHTS IN FISH!

Does this sound insane to anyone else?

Do you want the "prediction" in "prediction market" to mean something other than "massed guessing" or do you want the price to reflect as much information as possible so users can actually rely on the market price for other things?

I can understand the urge to want everyone to be playing around with the 'same' information, for fairness' sake, and the person who can use that info to best guess the outcome wins, but there's all KINDS of private, otherwise inaccessible information out there that it would be beneficial to draw into the open by incentivizing insiders.

An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone.

This information can benefit people who don't even participate in the market to have, is the thing. Seeing that there's suddenly an 85% chance of a new, completely unannounced iPhone being released is potentially useful, and you're under no obligation to trade against that info.

You WANT someone who has some specific, meaningful information to trade on it ASAP so as to update the price and disseminate that info to others who may be able to utilize it in their own trades or inform their own actions.

The unfortunate fact that a lot of people DO choose to gamble against potential insiders is really the only part I find morally questionable. Pumping and dumping and wash trading and hype trains happen all the time in 'regular' markets, though. Should people have been stopped from trading GME during the short squeeze? People got a tad pissed when exchanges blocked them from trading.

A gambler made nearly half a million dollars on the capture of Venezuela's president just before it was officially announced, raising questions about whether someone profited from inside knowledge of the US operation.

The funniest thing possible would be if it was Nicholas Maduro himself, trading on his polymarket account right as his door was being kicked in.

The arguments for permitting insider trading are pretty straightforward from an economics perspective. We want prices to incorporate all available information. Limitations on trading by insiders prevent information from being incorporated into a price as quickly as it could be. So restrictions on insider trading make prices less efficient, less useful, than they could otherwise be.

I think the best counterargument I've heard comes from some of Matt Levine's writings on US equity insider trading. The basic skeleton is that the restrictions on insider trading reflect a duty of confidentiality you have to some entity with respect to that information. If I am an employee of a company and come into possession of some material nonpublic information I have a duty to my employer to keep that information confidential and insider trading restrictions are a reflection of that duty. Trading on that information (or sharing it to others for them to trade on) violates that duty by revealing that information.

What that second argument looks like in the context of prediction markets is less clear. I think in the specific Maduro case whoever did the insider trading probably had a duty of confidentiality with respect to that information. Likely to the United States government. I am not sure how well it generalizes.

Does this sound insane to anyone else? Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already? Just create a market about things you know in advance, using proxies and crypto mixers to hide your identity and money trail if needed. An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone. More specifically, shill accounts would create markets pretending to be an outsider, and the employee and his accomplices would place the correct bets leading up to the deadline. Wash trades by accomplices could be placed to create hype and volume to lure unsuspecting traders.

One thing preventing just anyone from doing this is market liquidity. In order to make a substantial amount of money you need a lot of people to be willing to take the other side of the bet. Also, it seems like people are doing this. At least some of them.

There's also some weirdness in US law, specifically, about prediction markets technically being event contracts which are commodities and subject to different (more lax) insider trading rules than equities.

Up front caveat: I love prediction markets.

First, don't think of prediction markets as roughly the same as the stock market. They are wildly different. The "stock market" - which is, more broadly and accurate, the regulated exchange of financial instruments - is far more complex and serves vastly different purposes. The stock market is not about bidding on the correct outcome of something in the future. It isn't even, necessarily, about maximizing - in all cases - return on investment. Hedging and managing risk is just as important, if not more so. Much of it is about how to finance the ongoing operations of a firm. Still other parts of it are about building a portfolio that performs to a given objective with understandable and (didn't I already say this) manageable risk.

Most critically, the stock market never "resolves." It is continuous (unless, of course, we actually have a financial meltdown).

Prediction markets are, first, continuous before they're discreet. You have a range of outcomes, though most commonly two. People are free to trade their confidence on those outcomes (via price). That's it. Can this be manipulated to work like the stock market? Yeah, kind of. Except, the bids you make on Kalshi or Polymarket don't actually represent ownership in anything. There's no preference in liquidation (a la senior debt etc.) It's just a bet on what will, eventually, happen. It's a truth discovery mechanism.

Therefore, insider trading is actually great. If someone has better information, we want to know about it, and the market ought to reflect this. That a prediction market about Maduro being deposed even kicked off the night before the op is valuable info! Would I bet into it? Probably not. Which brings me to point 2:

Don't bet on things - directly - that can have insiders. The easy example is something like weather temperatures they are natural phenomena - nobody knows, for sure, what the weather will be tomorrow. There are other examples which are more indirect -- will Mike Johnson be speaker of the house at the end of next year? That requires a vote and no one knows what that vote will be until, perhaps, the very final hours before it happens. There is no insider here until after a certain time and, even then, it isn't a "hard" insider the way this Maduro thing probably was. It isn't hard to look at a market and go "how much insidering could there be?" If you want to bet into it, that's fine, that's your decision.

The knee jerk aversion to insider trading is mostly a product of a lot of Enron era hectoring by Congress and the press. (Fun fact: Enron wasn't even really insider trading so much as straight up fraud). To me, the bigger problem is that the overregulation of the markets makes insider trading "a thing" as the kids say. If markets were open 24/7 (as they should be), companies could choose to report whatever and whenever they wanted, there would be a lot less rigidity. The game would "move faster" and so trying to cheat at it via insider moves wouldn't be as profitable. Open and free flowing information means there is less opportunity to profit from having "special" information because so little of any information can be special when it's all "out there." The government created the space for insider trading to be a problem. Prediction markets show that it isn't a problem and, in fact, gets us faster to "truth".

It isn't hard to look at a market and go "how much insidering could there be?" If you want to bet into it, that's fine, that's your decision.

I wonder if someone smarter than me could come up with an "insider vulnerability index" that can be affixed to certain markets to give laypeople an approximate idea of how susceptible a given market is to a small cabal of insiders shifting the odds due to private knowledge or access.

Boxing matches being obviously riggable, large weather events being unriggable (unless you're a HAARP believer), and national elections sort of being in the middle.

Do you mean shifting an election market because your cabal knows Candidate A just had a stroke, or shifting an election to match your market?

Mostly the latter.

But, for example, candidates can collude, a candidate can drop out and endorse another, there's a few ways to nudge outcomes with 'guaranteeing' them.

Hell, a candidate could bet against themselves if they know that their opponent is about to drop some really juicy opposition research but also knows most of it is provably false.

I like the idea of predictions markets for hedging, and they can complement other strategies. For example, they can be used in lieu of stock options due to possible mispricings of probabilities. This is distinct though from my contrived example of someone with knowledge in advance of an outcome and then creating the market under the illusion or pretext of uncertainty and then profiting from the asymmetry of information. Or outright insider trading before the expiration, like shortly before the Venezuela attack. Because then there is no uncertainty that is being hedged and you're just profiting from the information asymmetry. This seems much more ethically iffy.

In the case of Mike Johnson , true, it's a binary outcome. But a military strike is not only binary, but also a unilateral decision by a single individual. So being privy to this knowledge makes the appropriate bet a no-brainer, verus predicting House votes.

If the public image of these prediction market companies becomes rife with stories of insider trading, anyone who doesn't insider trade is going to be understandably pissed. Because prediction markets are zero-sum, if a standard user spends time and mental energy placing a well-thought investment in a prediction market and some inside trader swoops in and capitalizes, that's going to leave a sour taste and disincentivize them from using the site. I'd guess that there are a whole lot more standard users than inside traders, so this could lead to some serious problems retaining their user-base. Perhaps this is a bit far-out, but eventually these sites could become dominated by inside traders seeking to effectively launder money with minimal involvement from anyone who doesn't insider trade.

If a standard user spends time and mental energy placing a well-thought investment in a prediction market and some inside trader swoops in and capitalizes, that's going to leave a sour taste and disincentivize them from using the site.

Hopefully that teaches them to expend a bit more mental energy thinking "hmmm, how many people might possess private information that will let them beat me in this market despite all my research?"

Perhaps this is a bit far-out, but eventually these sites could become dominated by inside traders seeking to effectively launder money with minimal involvement from anyone who doesn't insider trade.

To me that's a dream outcome. I'd like to just hook up to an API that pulls prediction market odds in real time (but doesn't TRADE on them) so I have a preternaturally accurate 'Oracle' I can query about uncertain events. Make the insiders work for me, rather than trade against them.

And eventually people will probably build 'insurance' products on top of these markets, which requires them to be more accurate and liquid. "Oh you're worried that your wedding day might be rained out? We'll sell you a contract that pays out 10x if it happens to rain on that day in that location."

I’ve always thought every government worker with a security clearance should be allowed to insider trade as a way to make up for their lower salaries than in the private sector.

What percentage of federal workers with a clearance are actually underpaid these days? The GS salary structure is not miserly, particularly if you are somewhere other than Northern Virginia, and the feds have often recruited for more permanent positions (places like the DOJ are often temporary places of employment for strivers and are outliers) middling candidates. Paired with stability of employment and the generous retirement programs and it seems like a good deal for a lot of them. Particularly given in a lot of these positions, maintaining clearance once you are out of government is not guaranteed and losing it would mean losing your private sector position.

What percentage of federal workers with a clearance are actually underpaid these days?

The people responsible for the successful execution of the Maduro capture added at least $100 billion in value to the US Equity market. There is no way they are being fairly compensated.

The stock market gaining $100 billion in valuation is easily within a standard deviation of movement

Eh, the stock market went up, but it's not necessarily a result. Why would deposing Maduro help the US equity markets that much?

Yeah, the biggest problem they'd get into for that isn't the SEC regulation violations.

but they get huge pensions, stable employment, top tier healthcare packages and other perks

but they get huge pensions

The old pension system which only boomers have was fairly generous (though still not "huge"), but the current one gives you at most 33% of your highest annual salary after 30 years of service, and requires around a 6% contribution.

stable employment

Have you been paying attention to Trump's second term?

top tier healthcare packages

Feds get access to Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Kaiser and a bunch of other health plans, but generally not "top tier" ones (or if they take the top tier it's very expensive). The government pays an employer contribution but it's not like feds are getting free or executive-level health care.

and other perks

Nothing that isn't pretty standard (and often better) in private industry.

Lockheed employees are not poor in retirement either.

Ultra niche markets would obviously be rife with insider betting. Fool and his money, etc.

yeah as long as there are fools with money, there will always be someone looking to separate them.

Reading the cases, the SEC is extremely aggressive about pursuing insider trading to protect investors and the notion of the 'fairness of the market'.

In the comments, one thing I have observed is the willingness of people to defend insider trading.... Does this sound insane to anyone else?

It doesn't to me. "Insider trading is good, actually" is not a fringe position, albeit it's a minority view to the dominant one that insider trading should be illegal. This section of the Wikipedia article summarizes it pretty well, that insider trading should be legal for free speech reasons and that it leads to more efficient markets and faster information dissemination. I'm somewhat indifferent.

Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already?

In the States, government agencies such as the FBI, DOJ, SEC, and CFTC are pretty aggressive at catching securities insider trading and even commodities insider trading. And now shadow trading too, using inside information to trade not in a security in itself, instead a different but correlated one.

There's more room in sports gambling though, to pull it off. Back in the day (and maybe they still do) sports gamblers would form consortiums and share information. Where different people will each tail different niche sports teams in Bumfuck cities to hopefully gain some private knowledge and then pool their knowledge together. However, sportsbooks tend to have a larger implicit bid-ask spreads than securities and commodities markets, and the more niche the market the larger the bid-ask spread. So you'd need to get it right a high percentage of time, do it over a long period of time, and/or get lucky with a few big bets. But doing so can also catch the eye of the FBI...

In the States, government agencies such as the FBI, DOJ, SEC, and CFTC are pretty aggressive at catching securities insider trading and even commodities insider trading. And now shadow trading too, using inside information to trade not in a security in itself, instead a different but correlated one.

But this is assuming it's illegal. I predict a similar outcome for prediction markets, where laws against insider trading are enforced, even for non-financial outcomes such as prediction markets for music sales. There is nothing a government agency wants to do more than expand the scope of its enforcement. KYC/AML is the obvious way. There is already a bill in the works https://www.axios.com/2026/01/05/venezuela-polymarket-prediction-insider-trading

But if this represents a sort of nebulous/grey area where the legality cannot be delineated as it is for the stock market or stock options, then it's rational to do this even if it's dubious ethically.

Because prediction markets are basically gambling and always have been. The stock market at least represents productive assets (or used to) that can be used to raise capital for firms and provide value to investors in terms of growth or dividends. There is no asset in a prediction market, just betting on a certain outcome. Same shit with sports betting or casino gambling. It's shitty, unproductive behavior, but for some reason the rationalist community endorses it because it helps to provide more quantitative information as to the mood of the population towards a specific topic.

but sports betting is highly regulated through. I agree it's gambling, but the idea of regulation is to project the illusion of 'fairness' and also to regulate money flows such as in the context of organized crime and taxes. As per regulation, a casino's 'house edge' cannot exceed a certain percentage, for example.

Coincidentally, insider trading was discussed just a few days ago here.

Culture war retrospective: We Own This City

I have a habit of not consuming contemporary media. There are so many TV shows, movies, video games, books, etc., and their number is ever-growing. There's an endless list of things you could or would enjoy, and a finite number of hours in your life. Trying to keep up with new releases is practically a hobby in itself. You can just have faith that the cream will rise to the top: quality will endure 5 or 10 or 50 years later, whereas conversely new releases tend to often attract uncritical praise and hype.

So over the Christmas break I watched We Own This City, a 2022 miniseries from David Simon, creator of The Wire. We Own This City was hailed as a sort-of companion piece to that show, a non-fiction story about Baltimore's infamous Gun Trace Task Force: a police unit that took it upon itself to beg, borrow, and steal as much money from the citizens of its city as it could. The show jumps around chronologically and across multiple plotlines, following both the development and deeds of the Task Force, its ultimate investigation and prosecution, reform efforts in response, and the investigation of a murder related to the Task Force. It got glowing reviews at the time, but that was to be expected given its critique of American policing and the bonafides of Simon. I decided to save it for a rainy day.

The show is really pulled together by a magnetic leading performance by Jon Bernthal as a sort of idiot savant corrupt cop Wayne Jenkins, replete with a fabulous white working class Bawlmore accent. He is the axis around which the whole show spins, and it’s hard to see the show working without him being so entertaining. He is simultaneously status-obsessed, disdainful of authority, resentful about a perceived lack of respect, and delusional about his own fallibility. But he also has a canny instinct about who to press and how hard, and things are going great – until they fall apart.

In stark contrast, the show grinds to an awful screeching halt whenever his counterpart (in every way) appears on screen. This is Nicola Steele, a (fictional) envoy from the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department to the city of Baltimore sent to spearhead police reform. She is in many ways an embodiment of the peak of “woke” politics in the United States, and given that I am not one to normally complain about these sorts of things that is an indication of how grating this part of the show is. It’s hard to judge exactly how on the nose this was meant to be, given that David Simon was and is very much not “woke” in the standard progressive sense, but it’s hard not to see a wealthy fat black woman (of course, played by a Nigerian!) delivering trite monologues of 2021-flavour social justice and fight off the urge to roll your eyes back into your skull. Ironically her role in the show as the deliverer of exposition and receiver of Long Monologues About What is Right makes her unintentionally seem like a naïve idiot who sucks at her job. But this itself is a trope of progressive art.

The contrast between her character and Wayne Jenkins appearing in the same show feels very bizarre in terms of how apart both the storytelling styles and quality is. The former is the embodiment of the worst of David Simon’s impulses: moral grandstanding, lectures to the audience, unimpeachable righteousness. The latter is proof of his genius: exciting and propulsive storytelling with great characters and incisive social commentary. The other cast of characters are generally solid, though it doesn’t quite pop with the same kind of rich minor roles that Simon’s other great television work has. Some viewers and critics apparently had trouble following the show’s chronology, which I didn’t: there are a number of inventive ways the show informs you when a given scene is happening from the interstitials, appearance, and background details (something Simon’s shows have always excelled at).

It’s hard not to wonder whether the show turns out better if it’s made even a year or two later. The tidewaters would have receded just that extra little bit to take the edge of the moral righteousness. Certainly it would have been an interesting parallel to draw at the time as the US as a whole was experiencing the same pullback in policing that Baltimore had experienced 6 years previous that resulted in the Gun Trace Task Force to escalate its actions. Of course on the flipside, with the looming possibility of another Trump presidential run, things might have turned out worse. Simon has a particular loathing for Trump that makes for bad art (have I ever shared my thoughts on The Plot Against America here?) and he might have been tempted to make things more polemical.

My recommendation: if you enjoyed The Wire you should definitely check We Own This City out, and feel no shame in fast-forwarding through any of the Justice Department scenes. Regardless of the quality, you already know how that story ends! And if you don’t think you want to watch it, definitely still go to youtube and watch a bunch of scenes of Jon Bernthal as Wayne Jenkins. It’s a lot of fun. Here’s an example.

I had never seen interstitial used in this way, well done.

Wayne Jenkins Quickly looked the guy up and he has that "absolute unit" look about him.

Good review.

There's also kind of an unintentional self-own. During the riot scene, when Jenkins gets everybody food, rallies the troops, and says something like "Everyone goes home tonight!" it's hard not to feel solidarity with the police as a horde of barbarians encircles them.

@Gillitrut @nomenym @faceh @HereAndGone2

I was following the discussion here on a recent scandal regarding AI-generated fake nudes with mild interest and went down into a bit of a rabbit hole in other earlier discussions that were linked. As a member of the he-man-woman-haters club and someone who used to follow Manosphere / Red Pill and dissident rightist sites, it appears to me that discussion on the wider context of this phenomenon is a bit lacking so I’ll offer a short overview myself.

It seems that there are multiple overlapping phenomena related to this issue:

#1 – High school boys creating fake nudes of their female classmates with or without AI and distributing them online among themselves; we can assume the individuals creating such content are a small minority and are usually of low social status, even practical outcasts otherwise

#2 – Some high school girls are sending real nudes of themselves to particular boys, which technically equals the production and distribution of child porn / CP; this is occurring in the larger context of a post-patriarchal, post-monogamist society where women are normally trying to out-slut one another in various ways to compete for the sexual attention of high-status men; sometimes such images get publicly distributed in the form of so-called revenge porn; obviously all of this is freaking out the adult women who are red-pilled enough to realize how self-defeating this entire sexual competition is

#1 and #2 are also occurring among college students and other adults but supposedly to a lesser degree, especially the fake nudes part; all this generates a relatively lower level of attention as the girls are all adults; it’s usually the revenge porn part that generates outrage, especially among feminists and their so-called male allies

#3 – there’s something that’s basically a subset of revenge porn, namely the private nudes of female celebrities getting publicized through hacking and content theft; fake nudes of them also obviously exist

#1, #2 and #3 are basically overlapping issues in the minds of normies, providing fodder for lipstick feminist and social conservative culture warriors.

We should look at the even wider social context of all this. What is the overall milieu that is shaping the attitudes of high school students?

#1 – Female sexuality itself has become a culture war issue in a particular way. What do I basically mean? Look at the usual preferences of anti-feminist toxic dudebros for a start: the women appearing in movies and video games to be smoking hot and scantily clad; their own girlfriends to be modest and demure in public but otherwise be their own personal sluts in private, while at the same time not even thinking about becoming OF/porn girls or “sex workers”. Culture-warring feminists look at all this with anger and naturally go on to loudly promote the exact opposite of all this by all means. This is basically a significant driver of the culture war altogether, and probably generates a level of resentment among young men towards feminists and feminist-adjacent women in general, a sort of resentment that never existed before feminism.

#2 – It has become completely normal for slop-creating female pop musicians, female celebrities altogether and female “influencers” to show their bare butts and thighs, cleavage, midriff etc. both online and offline; however, all of this is pointedly not done for the purposes that average men would prefer it all to have, namely a) providing simple entertainment / fanservice for dudebros and their male gaze without any feminist BS attached b) utilizing eroticism in order to attract high-value men into relationships with the promise of hot sex (which has basically been normal female behavior for thousands of years) c) showing off the goods as prostitutes if you are one. Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything, and are supposedly engaging in all this virtual whoring / thirst farming with a sort of weird irony in mind, where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever. Naturally, none of this is generating one ounce of male sympathy towards these women and their female fans.

#3 – Online porn has been normalized to such an extent that pretty much the only people receiving any unstated and limited social permission to complain about women engaging in it are the so-called sex negative feminists. Otherwise it’s all seen as another expression of female empowerment as long as the pretension is there that somehow none of it is done to please or benefit men. It has become an accepted social reality that average women will happily suck dick, swallow cum, do gangbangs online for the money, and it’s all normal, because it’s not like they are doing anything objectionable or whatever. We’re also seeing the spectacle of young women taking the usual route of doing hardcore porn, milking their career for all the money they can, then retiring and having some sort of fake-ass epiphany later, crying their butts off in online videos claiming regret, stating that they’re the victims of some evil patriarchal regime that ostracized them, appearing on anti-porn podcasts etc., demanding that their videos be removed from the internet, complaining about their young children being bullied etc.

Again, I leave it to your imagination to decide what attitudes towards women are all this driving among young men.

Look at the usual preferences of anti-feminist toxic dudebros for a start: ... their own girlfriends to be modest and demure in public but otherwise be their own personal sluts in private

Keeping sexuality within the relationship, and enjoying it to the fullest in private, is anti-feminist toxic dudebroism now?

The world continues to get crazier and crazier every time I look out the window of my church.

I've seen a number of comments below discussing porn. I initially planned to respond to these comments individually, but it's a substantial enough line of thinking that I figured a second-level comment on my part was appropriate.

It seems the commentariat here is fixated on the apparent contradiction between feminism and porn use - that porn clearly produces negative outcomes so it is ludicrous that modern feminists support it. How could pornography be "empowering" when it makes men sloppy lovers at best and dangerous sex pests at worst? I spent an inordinate amount of time with well-educated feminist women while at college, so I feel decently qualified to paraphrase what they've told me.

I'll preface with an important premise: pornography is not a single stimulus, but rather a diverse palette of erotic visuals that are lumped together under the umbrella term porn. The gap between studio produced porn and amateur content is as vast as the latest Marvel blockbuster and a limited run Criterion release. In high production porn, much like many professions, it is not uncommon to work under a domineering, unrealistic boss that overworks you and underpays you. These pornographic outlets are also the epicenter for most of the abuse in the industry. On the other hand, OF and amateur porn has a significantly flattened authority structure, and the performers no longer need to engage in unrealistic and demeaning sex acts to mold themselves into a male-gazey superstimulus. At least not to the degree of studio porn. This distinction is important: many of the women I spoke to advocated that studio content be eradicated, as the industry has problems. That does not implicate porn in general. This is also where the idea of empowerment begins to creep in. It is not empowering to be tossed around like a commodity by a profiteering pseudo-pimp. However, it is empowering in some sense to create your own erotic content because it represents a kind of authentic choice, especially when compared to traditional sexual norms and the prevailing idea that men can be sexually open with fewer social consequences. It is empowering precisely because of this contrast. In a world where men were not sowing their wild oats, I'm unsure if notions of empowerment would have really taken off.

Second, porn is not the be-all end all of sexual depiction. The thinking was that porn, much like alcohol, is clearly a vice that can be enjoyed responsibly when it is consumed in the appropriate quantity and with the appropriate precautions. Yes, alcohol (porn) can cause problems. Yes, alcohol (porn) is probably bad for you in excess. But the alternative of banning it is paternalistic and likely to produce its own crop of negative outcomes. This is another part of the empowerment angle: freedom to consume and choose. You could probably track down a gallon of Everclear and chug it, and few would come clamoring to ban alcohol. The relationship one has with alcohol is on them - some are teetotalers, some are social drinkers, some probably flirt a little close with alcoholism, but it's still a conclusion they came to. The same can be said with porn. It was often suggested that if porn was illegal, it would drive the industry underground and prompt even more abuse toward the women performing in it, as their employers would no longer be accountable to the legal system, per se. So porn ought to be at least tolerated. Bonnie Blue and those like her were considered unrepresentative morally questionable aberrations, more a product of our outrage-driven media landscape rather than exemplars of feminism in practice.

The last prong of this argument involves sex education. Some of the negative behavioral outcomes in porn, particularly the way it "teaches" men to have unhealthy sex, can be prevented by appropriate, candid sex ed. Their idea of sex ed wasn't simply putting a condom on a banana, but discussions about consent, love, and intimacy. Further, if porn use and sexuality in general are made to be more "normal," young adults could feel more comfortable discussing these topics with parents and trusted adults. I'm reminded of the perennial toaster-fucker greentext. I can imagine a world where /r/ToasterFuckers exists and a parent successfully guides their child away from it with the appropriate support. The mere existence of /r/ToasterFuckers is not the problem. While porn may be particularly tempting, I don't see how it is entirely immune to guidance. This is the classic "if you're going to drink, you're going to do it in my house." Is it effective? It's hard to say, and it's certainly a tall order compared to the status quo. But on its face it is at least logically coherent.

And, of course, there were plenty of discussions about age restrictions. It seems trivially true to me that a 21-year-old can handle porn better than a 12-year-old. Is there such a thing as an effective age restriction online? I'm not sure.

I think there are still problems with this argument - namely, that women choosing to make porn are often compelled to do so out of financial need which makes it unempowering at times. It also doesn't address moral arguments about porn's existence, like if porn is fundamentally immoral or disrespectful to human sexuality. It addresses most of the consequentialist points well, though, and I wanted to provide it the best I could to flesh out some of the positions that may not be as well-represented on this forum.

I think there are still problems with this argument - namely, that women choosing to make porn are often compelled to do so out of financial need which makes it unempowering at times.

Yes, and for Onlyfans in particular, only 1% of the women make 99% of the money (or a similar ratio), meaning the overwhelming majority of women on there are selling their dignity and trading away immeasurable respect and status for pennies on the dollar. I consider this exploitative.

That's just true of any kind of showbiz?

How many musicians make real money? How many starlets make it big in Hollywood? Are you going to bite the bullet and call those industries exploitative too? So exploitative that they deserve to be shut down? What is the competition ratio and Gini-coefficient worthy of concern?

The difference is that musicians aren't selling pictures of their genitals online, and if you stop being a musician there aren't lasting negative consequences from your past career as a musician.

I lost a perfectly good draft because I tried to tab over to the Billboard 100. Apparently the bloated modern web is too much for my phone. Whatever.

I think your model is extremely autistic (non-derogatory) and also useless (derogatory). I’m not sure how you could come to half of these conclusions. It’s as if your experience of women is drawn entirely from thinkpieces and dubious IRC roulette.

obviously all of this is freaking out the adult women who are red-pilled enough to realize how self-defeating this entire sexual competition is

Could you think of any other reasons why people might object to teenage nudes?

Culture-warring feminists look at all this with anger and naturally go on to loudly promote the exact opposite of all this by all means.

Could you think of any other reasons why feminists might actually want some of those opposite things?

where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever

Could you think of any other reasons why a mass-media product might hold contradictory, even trite messages?

Each time, you stop at whatever reason is most convenient for your thesis. This is a terrible way to build a model. Your examples—if you can call them such—aren’t very convincing, either.

all of this is pointedly not done for the purposes that average men would prefer it all to have

none of this is generating one ounce of male sympathy towards these women and their female fans.

it’s all seen as another expression of female empowerment

If the plural of anecdotes is not data, surely your own solitary anecdote isn’t.

Stats or GTFO!

Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything, and are supposedly engaging in all this virtual whoring / thirst farming with a sort of weird irony in mind, where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever.

Indeed, it's basically a trope nowadays that female celebrities (or attractive young women in general) will complain about being sexualized and then post thirst-traps the next. Here's one example from Ariel Winter:

“It’s called being a woman in the industry,” said Winter, 18. “It’s complete sexism. It’s really degrading, annoying and sad that this is what the media puts out, it’s disgusting to me.”

Also Ariel Winter:

The Modern Family actress stripped to her bikini and hopped onto the wooden vessel with a pal.

Yet choosing not to smile for the camera against the backdrop of the glistening blue waters, they stuck out their derrieres instead as they lay on a towel with their backs facing the camera.

Teenage Ariel posted the cheeky snap with the words: “Your favourite wives in paradise.”

Some individual pop stars were mentioned elsewhere by various commenters elsewhere in this thread. These include Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter.

The simplest and most parsimonious explanation as to why such a range of popstars paint their faces, teehee around in skimpy outfits, and bask in the center of attention as sex objects is because they enjoy painting their faces, teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, and basking in the center of attention as sex objects and they're successful at it. The popstars' collective fanbases are wildly disproportionately heterosexual teenage girls and young women because they too enjoy painting their faces, teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, and basking in the center of attention as sex objects, and thus can relate to and live vicariously through such popstars.

When it comes to other entertainers such as male professional athletes, we generally automatically accept by default that they choose to play their sport as a profession because they enjoy doing so and are successful at it. In explaining why they do what they do, we usually don't start grasping for some Occam's Butterknife about them getting groomed, coerced, manipulated, or constrained by society. The fanbases of male professional athletes are predominantly male because they too enjoy(ed) playing that sport, wish they were that good at that sport, and/or can relate to and live vicariously through such athletes.

Yet when it comes to why female popstars choose to sexualize themselves—and why their fanbases tend to be wildly disproportionately heterosexual teenage girls and young women—out come the excuses about grooming, coercion, manipulation, Socialization, internalized misogyny, the male gaze, being sexualized against their will, etc., lest some women out there feel less Wonderful on behalf of the female gender. This could fit well into the "midwit" meme template, where the guy in the middle goes "nooo female popstars don't like being sex objects but if they do sexualize themselves it's only due to sleazy male managers and misogynistic marketing constraints and their female fans are just victims of marketing, socialization, conditioning, and internalized misogyny" while the guys on the left and the right go "female popstars and their female fans like being sex objects."

Another natural experiment is what these popstars do in their free-time and in private. While what they do in private is hard to come by (kind of by definition), that's where events like the Fappening come in handy (in more ways than one, perhaps). The Fappening shined a hilarious light into the lives of popstars such as Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus, whose photos contained numerous nude selfies and ass, pussy, tit shots. So it's not just an act, a show they conduct, a persona they put on for marketing purposes. Sexualizing themselves is a hobby they enjoy doing; being a sex object is an aspiration and their past-time, consistent with the revealed preferences of young women in general.

Do what you love and you never have to work a day in your life. Just like retired NBA players such as Luke Walton and Jason Williams sometimes play or played men's league basketball in their spare time, Britney Spears spends her retirement days posting thirst traps and almost-nudes. I say "almost" since as far as I'm aware—being the modest woman that she is—she covers up her nipples, pussy, and/or asshole with her hands while in her birthday suit. Tellingly, a lot of female college and professional athletes, whether active or former, also spend a lot of their on-court and off-court efforts to being sex objects.

while the guys on the left and the right go "popstars and their female fans like being sex objects."

Yeah, you remind me of a (male) pro-wrestler or such who referred to himself as something like "the ultimate object of female desire." i.e. most people like being, in some sense, sex objects.

And you can bet that if it would give them sexual attention that was positive and female, a large percentage of guys would be prancing around in miniskirts and crop tops.

Funnily enough, when it comes to pro-wrestling, female pro-wrestlers provide additional data-points as to the female desire to be sex objects.

Despite being in the right tail of female wealth and physical strength, female pro-wrestlers still love teeheeing around in skimpy outfits.

And by their revealed preferences they also love being submissive sex objects in private, such as demonstrated by WWE Paige giggling as she takes a load on her face, splashing upon her Championship Belt.

That first Ariel Winter quote doesn't seem to be anti-sexualization, rather that she has received criticism/hate/thermonuclear online bile as a result of posting in a sexualized way. The "sexism" she points out is that people tell her to stop sexualizing herself or are mean about it. Even in that case, I don't see the issue with her being upset that others sexualize her. Obviously, sexualizing oneself is likely to produce an outsized degree of sexual attention and criticism. However, that doesn't automatically imply she's a hypocrite or stupid or what-not. To analogize: most famous people have to live with a security detail for the rest of their life, deal with stalkers, etc. I think it would be unreasonable to tell a celebrity that they should just stop being famous (even if that's a valid "solution" to the problem), otherwise they're a hypocrite. In an ideal world, they could be famous without those issues, but the whackos have to ruin it. The same goes for sexualization. People are allowed to complain about the negative consequences or risks of an act while still engaging in said act - there is nothing logically compromising in doing so, in my view.

One can always add more epicycles, carry more water, and find more ways to gerrymander as to why it doesn’t count, why there's not a disconnect between a given female celebrity's words and her actions.

Just off the top of my head, Brie Larson and Scarlett Johansson could serve as additional examples with regard to their public remarks, outfits they wear to events, their bodily displays on film, and the photos and/or videos they take of themselves privately.

I don't think it counts as an epicycle to point out "actually, she isn't complaining about being sexualized".

I don’t think it’s that hard to do a brief websearch for more quotes from Winter or other female celebrities before a contentless one sentence drive-by, if the previous example were insufficiently close to “hello, I am a female celebrity and I woud like to complain about being sexualized”:

“…As women in the industry, we are totally over-sexualized and treated like objects,” she [Winter] said in an interview with Glamour. "Every article that has to do with me on a red carpet had to do with ‘Ariel Winter’s Crazy Cleavage!’ or ‘Ariel Winter Shows Huge Boobs at an Event!’

There’s also a HuffPost article “Ariel Winter Wants To Remind You That Girls Are Not Sexual Objects” where Ariel’s IG caption is signal boosted:

When you interrupt a girl's school day to force her to change clothes, or send her home because her shorts are too short or her bra straps are visible, you are telling her that making sure boys have a "distraction free" learning environment is more important than her education.

Instead of shaming girls for their bodies, teach boys that girls are not sexual objects.

Or a People article:

But according to Winter, it’s not just the toxic self-talk and Internet shaming that women have to overcome, it’s also the lessons that are being passed down from our government directly. She says, “Our leadership is really anti-women right now. Thanks to Donald Trump, we’re being objectified and made to feel bad about ourselves, so I think it’s really important for women to stick together and do the opposite of that; to let their bodies be seen and be heard, and to empower each other; to remind each other that what they look like is not the only thing that’s important when it comes to who they are.”

Bolding above mine. Impressive Trump hyperagency.

A wild Ariana Grande quote that appeared somewhere along the way:

Grande admitted she thought the fan's urgency was "cute and exciting" until he exclaimed to Mac Miller, "Ariana is sexy as hell man. I see you, I see you hitting that!"

The pop star, who was sitting right beside Miller during the confrontation, told fans she felt "sick and objectified" and explained, "Things like this happen all the time and are the kinds of moments that contribute to women's sense of fear and inadequacy." Grande felt compelled to address this specific instance, knowing the shame women have similarly felt after being demeaned by men.

Even temporarily putting Winter, Larson, or Johansson aside, additional quotes from PopSugar by similarly aged Chloe Moretz to Winter who was reportedly at one time or different times an ally or enemy or frenemy of Winter for whatever reason:

The star called out the Miss Universe pageant for sexualizing women's bodies during the swimsuit competition, posting her inspiring points on Twitter:

Miss universe is still judging women walking around in bathing suits. If it's based on confidence, why r we zooming in on their bodies?.. — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) December 21, 2015

It's a new time.. I think it's time we cut the swimsuit section from miss Universe .. — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) December 21, 2015

On top of it all, the host keeps overtly sexualizing the young women. What is happening on tv right now .. — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) December 21, 2015

Let's do a miss universe based on interviews and public speaking and philanthropic tenacity — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) December 21, 2015

Whether historically Moretz can be commonly found in bikini or underwear in her public work and personal photos I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

we can assume the individuals creating such content are a small minority and are usually of low social status, even practical outcasts otherwise

I wouldn't assume that at all. All teenage boys are hormone factories, and all straight teenage boys fucking love women and fantasizing about them. When I was in school, it was not at all uncool to talk behind closed doors about the girls in your class you wanted to fuck, how hot they are, how much of a slut she is, how your totally gonna bang her one day, etc. I can't imagine that's changed, even considering the rampant feminist conditioning. Even adults do this, though they use whatever additional social grace that their developed brains afford them. Generating fake nudes and sharing them with your friends (privately, to whatever degree that can be considered private) seems like the logical extension of that.

I guess it's not clear to me what I'm supposed to do this this purported context. Are the factors identified here supposed to serve as justification? It's ok for men to generate and distribute nonconsensual nude images of women and girls because X and Y? Or an explanatory purpose? Men are doing this because of these factors, no comment on the permissibility? Either way I don't see how this is supposed to work. "Feminists complain about scantily clad women in video games so obviously middle school boys are going to generate nonconsensual pornography of their classmates" Huh?

An explanation does not equal a justification. I didn't disagree with the OP but again, it ignored the wider social context of all of this entirely. Which is fair, but I thought it'd be warranted to respond in a different comment.

What I was trying to get at is that your comment says this context is connected to the phenomena in my comment but it's not clear to me how.

I was describing the cultural milieu that present-day high schoolers have grown up in. It's also the only world they've ever known. For one thing, the idea that their female peers are capable of sexual shame, even if its source are images that don't exist in real life, isn't something many of them can grok.

Re: porn, I'm sorry but this just reads like boo stupid hypocritical bitches trying to take our fun away.

The number one complaint I hear from women about porn is that it gives men a very confused, one-sided view of sex. You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!

This seems pretty valid to me, and is a separate issue from deciding to cash in on male appetites for porn.

You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied.

Nowadays I have a simple principle: her pleasure, her responsibility.

The number one complaint I hear from women about porn is that it gives men a very confused, one-sided view of sex. You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!

Women will complain about porn but these reasons are largely post-hoc fictions. They have a gut-level aversion to their partner experiencing lust towards other women that are typically younger and better-looking than them. But because of their vague sex-positive pop feminist beliefs they don’t know how to articulate that and will backfill a reason that sounds less jealous and more socially acceptable.

You would see the same if they found their partner was having sex with dogs. This would greatly upset them but they would state the reason is something to do with animals being unable to consent, which of course is not the real reason.

They have a gut-level aversion to their partner experiencing lust towards other women that are typically younger and better-looking than them

I agree that's probably a factor, but I think there are other factors in play. Women object to porn not only if it's their male partner consuming it but also if it's some basement-dwelling incel type.

I think that at a deep, instinctual level, women appreciate that (1) without male service, they would quite literally starve to death; and (2) they receive male service in large part due to men's need for female validation, often through sex. So that when a woman sees a man getting sexual gratification without paying dearly for it, she instinctively finds it very threatening. So for example, if a female pop star becomes wealthy in part by flaunting her body on stage, women tend to be okay with it. But if that same woman instead flaunts her body for a porn mag for $200 a week, women tend to get outraged.

I think there exist plenty of women who would not like it if their partner consumed and masturbated to porn but have little issue with its existence as a whole, particularly when used by single people or in relationships where its use is agreed to. Plenty of women I know have articulated this in addition to concerns about giving men a confused view of sex. It is not hypocritical to support the existence of porn and not want it to be misused in a partnered relationship with expectations of sexual exclusivity. Nor do I think it's a women-only phenomenon: plenty of men don't want their girlfriends looking at porn for similar reasons despite having used it in their past or sharing similar hesitation. I think the only problematic view would be expecting your partner to refuse it while continuing to use it yourself.

Partnered relationships with expectations of sexual exclusivity? What, I can't use my right hand by myself in a relationship?

It is hypocrisy, or at least gross overreach. Most of the women I've known IRL have been neutral to positive towards porn, but the ones who found it objectionable would find it even more objectionable if their boyfriends demanded they stop using their vibrators and reading smut in their spare time. Often they go as far as to claim that smut isn't the same as a porno, since one is coarse and visual, and the other is in the rarefied realms of imagination.

which of course is not the real reason

And further, this is the reason why older women push to have women younger then them treated as mentally equivalent to animals -> unable to consent, hence #fightfor25 (and to a large degree #metoo).

and will backfill a reason that sounds less jealous and more socially acceptable.

Well, that and feminists still need men to enforce the social order that privileges them. Saying this directly would destroy that compact.

You would see the same if they found their partner was having sex with dogs. This would greatly upset them but they would state the reason is something to do with animals being unable to consent, which of course is not the real reason.

Come on. I am pretty sure that most women, feminist or not, would be disgusted at the thought of their partner having sex with dogs and would not need "Animals can't consent" as a justification for their disgust.

"Women only hate porn because they're jealous of hotter younger women" is also very uncharitable and probably not true, or at least their stated reasons for hating porn are also genuine, even if insecurity about hotter younger women plays a part.

Come on. I am pretty sure that most women, feminist or not, would be disgusted at the thought of their partner having sex with dogs and would not need "Animals can't consent" as a justification for their disgust.

Of course they would be disgusted, daguerran was not denying that. But they would be unable to justify it as anything else than lack of consent because disgust is outside of the moral vocabulary of the modern liberal west (as per Haidt's observations on WEIRD morality). Try explaining why it's disgusting without resorting to a variant of "it hurts the animal" (or imagine a situation where the animal initiated, and is clearly unhurt by it). You'll inevitably end up sounding like a rabbi or an imam explaining why eating pork is impure. Of course, in many situations it probably also hurts the animal, so the objection is also partially genuine, but it's a different impulse that led to digging for a post-hoc justification for condemnation.

Similarly he posits that jealousy is outside that vocabulary, and that the justifications for porn-negativity given are post-hoc, even if they might still make a genuine point sometimes.

A good test for that would if someone offered as a solution that porn be mandated to be instructive in helping men bring women to orgasm, but otherwise could still be of hot younger women. Do you think the complaints would stop? Do you think there's any amount of accomodations that could be done for the goalposts to stop moving? Personally, I think he's right on the money that the only accomodations that would do it are those that make either porn unthreatening to the sexual value of those complaining about it, or so unenjoyable that men stop watching.

This is also partly a communication issue, no? The woman either failed to communicate what she wants from the man, or the man did not listen or understand when she did so.

Had the man not watched porn but still been abstaining from sex for decades, he would also not know how to satisfy a woman. So you get the same experience of the woman leaving unsatisfied. The main difference would be that the abstainer probably has fewer preconceptions, so maybe he will be more careful. But that does not directly correlate with being better at sex.

Yeah, there's a lot of romance in the idea of so carefully reading your partner's microexpressions that you can tell exactly how they want things or how things are working at a given time, but in the real world it's something you actually have to use your words to get done properly.

Ironically, the "communication issue" can be looked at a similar way as porn only with the genders reversed: women get a very confused one-sided view of how relationships work from media targeting their fantasies, one where the man always knows exactly what the woman wants and delivers without her having to communicate at all...

I actually don't think this one is specifically gendered. Both my wife and I have at times struggled with expecting the other to know our preferences and desires without having to explicate them.

The experience isn't gendered, but the cultural narrative about it is. Women are not criticized for failing to live up to their partner's unvoiced expectations to nearly the extent men are (EDIT:), largely as a consequence of men being expected to communicate directly and women being expected to communicate indirectly.

I agree with this and, sadly, think it extends further.

When men do communicate directly, it's perfectly acceptable for a female partner to issue a blanket veto in either a positive or negative sense.

"Hey, babe, I like blowjobs."

"I am not a fleshlight for your entertainment!"

Subtext: The guy wasn't commanding or coercing a blowjob, but was voicing his own kinks or whatever. The response assumed an imperative "command" and the veto is delivered.

"Hey, babe, I'm stoked about your plans for your friend's baby shower, but, that's the same time as the football game I wanted to watch. Perhaps you go it alone?"

"You never support me!"

Subtext: The guy is gently trying to message that he'll be miserable at the baby shower, it's likely she will detect his miserableness, and this, in and of itself, may be the cause of a fight later in the day. Furthermore, he has a reason that is, to him, quite important to not be at the babyshower. He's probably looking to make a compromise, she immediately jumps to the assumption that he's merely thinking "lol, fucking gay-ass babyshower."

First, I don't think the above is the de facto communication pattern in modern relationships. It is, however, common enough in my own experience and observation that I don't think what I've outlined above qualifies as hyperbole. And, of course, there are mature couples who can talk about their sexual kinks / fantasies etc. without getting weirded out (even if it includes toaster fucking) and can reasonably make concessions on social outings and recreation to fit each other's strong preferences as well.

Still, I think there is a an imbalance between how normie men and women are allowed / incultured to use vetos and other strong-arm relationship tactics. And I believe it is new. I can remember as a child asking my Grandfather what going to work was like for him (did you use a typewriter or a quill pen, ahahaha!) He told me about his day and then dropped this nice little anecdote;

"Your Grandma always had dinner ready when I got home, because a good wife knows that her husband is going to be hungry after a long day of work!" The obvious level of recoil on one or two of my aunt's faces was priceless. Even the more well adjusted pair rolled their eyes and gave small smirks.

But, perhaps, isn't this just the revelation of my Grandfather's preference that he, very likely, explicitly communicated to my Grandmother? Was this horrifically insulting and demeaning to Grandma? (I can assure you it was not.)

In today's normie long term relationships, I see a verbal pattern with men that is equivocal and designed to be low impact. "Hey, babe, I was thinking that ..." or " You know what could be fun?" or "Oh, hey, wanted to run something by you ...." It is extremely uncommon to hear a direct imperative tense verb; "Pick up the dry cleaning, please" or "Make sure dinner is ready at 6:30" or "We are going to the potluck on Saturday." This is a retreat from male coded directness to female coded subtlety. It is, in fact, the de facto verbal mode of the basic normie marriage.

You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!

And that is surprising...how? Visual porn normally caters to men, not women. Of course it doesn't normally work as a training film for bringing women to orgasm. Duh. It's the equivalent of reading romance novels in order to learn how to please men.

It's not surprising that porn-for-(non-autogynophilic)-men avoids seeing what the inside of a woman's head feels like. It is kinda weird from a bi guy perspective how much straight-for-guy's-eyes porn focuses on the man or men, and how little is focused on something really prioritizing women qua woman. I would expect places like I Feel Myself to be a genre, but they really don't look like it.

I doubt it would help a lot even if it existed -- there's a lot of variation from one person to another, as a lot of same-sex couples have found out for better or worse -- but still strange.

So much this.

The number one complaint I hear from women about porn is that it gives men a very confused, one-sided view of sex. You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!

I guess apologies if this is TMI but this was literally me with my wife when we were in high school. The first time I fingered her my only experience was from porn and so naturally that was what I tried to replicate. It was a painful uncomfortable experience for her and she left quite unsatisfied. Fortunately for me my response was to go online and look up some actual useful information about what women like. Talk with her about her preferences. Developing the skills to bring her to orgasm was not that hard! Unfortunately I get the impression a lot of men have the opposite takeaway. "If she doesn't like what the women in porn like, it must be something wrong with her!"

On #2, you're overthinking it. It's still fanservice just with a feminist veneer. @HereAndGone2 suggests naive female pop stars are being manipulated into this by evil male managers, but I suggest that's crap -- they know what they're doing too.

It's still fanservice just with a feminist veneer.

In a nutshell, indeed it is.

But female popstars don't attract a straight male audience with the fanservice. Swifties and Arianators (who seem to be the biggest still-active popstars with that vibe) are overwhelmingly female - men aren't willing to pay that much money to see Taylor Swift gyrate in a bodysuit while singing chick-orientated music. (Male artists who use female backing singers and dancers as fanservice is a different proposition - that isn't going anywhere and the male fanbase like it).

Google AI says that the female solo artist with the largest male fanbase in absolute terms is Mariah Carey (who was as thirst-trappy by the standards of her day as Swift and Grande are now), but her fanbase is mostly female with queers over-represented - she's just big enough that the substantial minority of straight male fans is a big number.

Female soloists with male-skewed fanbases (again, per Google AI) include Joan Jett (and the Blackhearts), Stevie Nicks, Alanis Morisette, Pink, Hayley Williams (leads Paramore), and April Lavigne. Of those, only April Lavigne does sexy, and her sexy persona is much more gothy and less girl-next-door than the singers with female fanbases. (I also think there is a pattern of female singers leading mostly-male instrumental bands having more male fanbases than female singers who rely on session musicians).

Whatever Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande doing with the minidresses and bodysuits, it is appealing to young women far more than it does to men. The Freudian analysis would be something on the lines of women wanting to be the centre of attention for their sexual desirability and therefore wanting the icons they vicariously live through to perform sexual desirability when they are the centre of attention. An interesting point about female popstars' slutty stage outfits I remember reading in a dentist's waiting room was that the outfits are designed like technical dancewear - and suggesting that part of what is going on is that "slop-creating female pop musicians" (great turn of phrase, @Botond173) see themselves as dancers (who were always more sexualised than singers).

The other point of comparison is women's athletic uniforms - where the only reason they aren't continuing to get skimpier is because they can't without an unacceptable risk of wardrobe malfunctions. It is very obvious that most (but not all) female athletes want people (probably other women at least as much as men) to look at their toned bodies. And this isn't just a chick thing - straight male bodybuilders are desperate for other men to look at their toned bodies.

I think Sabrina Carpenter is an interesting case study here. Her music is ridiculously sexually explicit, she performs in lingerie and a core part of her act is miming heterosexual sex positions. That said, I get the sense her audience/fanbase is approximately 0% heterosexual male. It gives me the same vibe as burlesque, which seems to be a major form of entertainment for blue tribe women in major cities yet has zero sexual currency with hetero men. Burlesque performances will include lingerie and actual nudity from women, but I don’t get the sense any straight men are watching burlesque compilations on pornhub.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, but I feel burlesque is sort of spiritually akin to male war reenactors. They are both reenacting the past to give themselves gender valdiating experiences, men getting to pretend to experience heroism and self-sacrifice in combat, frumpy feminists getting to experience a reenactment of sexual desirability

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, but I feel burlesque is sort of spiritually akin to male war reenactors. They are both reenacting the past to give themselves gender valdiating experiences, men getting to pretend to experience heroism and self-sacrifice in combat, frumpy feminists getting to experience a reenactment of sexual desirability

Well, damn. I never thought about all that this way before.

They are both reenacting the past to give themselves gender valdiating experiences, men getting to pretend to experience heroism and self-sacrifice in combat

War re-enactors?! No, these are neckbeards playing dress up. They want to be hailed for their assiduous attention to historical detail and accuracy, not their "heroism." Even if airsoft, which is pseudo-athletic, most of the time is spent geeking out over hyperrealistic gear, rather than drilling movement to contact.

The male "gender validation" activity is sports. Go to any sports bar and just listen, you'll find several different styles of conversation, but it's all about the fantasy of kicking the shit out of the other team. You have the has been High School QBs who know more about the game than the NFL does ("sloppy defense!"), you have the hyper nerds who want to systematize dominance ("Davante Adams averages 1.8 yards of separation per target, you can't cover him even if you're covering him!"), and just the highly emotive (and likely drunk) general issue fans ("Go! go! go! COME ON, COME ON, YOU CAN'T CALL THAT A HOLD!").

miming heterosexual sex positions.

I woke up feelin' cheesiest, coach in a kind of DEUS VULT! mood. This has only exacerbated it. Burn the witch.

War re-enactors?! No, these are neckbeards playing dress up. They want to be hailed for their assiduous attention to historical detail and accuracy, not their "heroism." Even if airsoft, which is pseudo-athletic, most of the time is spent geeking out over hyperrealistic gear, rather than drilling movement to contact.

I guess there is a fine line between cosplay and military reenactment, isn't there?

And the Freudian analysis is probably correct. Also, I didn't just have female soloists in mind but various K-pop girl groups as well.

there is a pattern of female singers leading mostly-male instrumental bands having more male fanbases than female singers who rely on session musicians

There is in fact such a pattern in certain metal genres that has basically become the butt of jokes and meme material among male metal fans.

Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything, and are supposedly engaging in all this virtual whoring / thirst farming with a sort of weird irony in mind, where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever.

Or a third option: young female performers (take the case of Britney Spears) get steered by older male managers into "now it's time for your hot horny bitch phase" under the pretext of "no, no, this is empowering you, you're claiming your sexuality!" and similar guff. By the time they wise up to what's going on, it's too late and they're stuck with this image. I hate that girls are being taught that 'yeah, you gotta send nudes to your boyfriend if you want to keep him, that's just how it is' and then we get 13 year olds finding out that their private photos are being shared around for laughs and wank material.

But I'm a dinosaur. The socially conservative society I would prefer has been dynamited and we're all standing in the rubble.

It has become an accepted social reality that average women will happily suck dick, swallow cum, do gangbangs online for the money, and it’s all normal, because it’s not like they are doing anything objectionable or whatever.

Because it became normalised first in sexual relationships, when men started asking for what they saw in porn. "What do you mean, you don't want to suck my dick? Fine, you don't want to do that, I'll find another girl who will". Now blowjobs are just commonplace parts of what is the expected sexual repertoire. Heterosexual anal sex has gone the same way: from something only seen in porn to something daring when discussed in the mainstream to "spice up your sex life, ten top tips for having butt sex and keeping your man happy". See Dan Savage's "Good, Giving and Game" where if your partner doesn't want to engage in whatever kink or fetish you apparently can't live without, then if they're not willing to give in you are perfectly entitled to look for someone willing outside the relationship, or dump that partner's vanilla prude ass. That was in the context of gay sexual relationships, but the advice was trickling out for straight relationships as well: if she won't do it for you, then you are justified in finding someone who will.

Are you really surprised young women have learned this is what is expected of them? OnlyFans and the rest of it are just the fruits of this taken to its logical extreme.

I think that we in the modern West struggle to understand these things because we have lost the understanding that intentionally tempting someone is a sin, and we have lost the ideas we need to discuss two people sinning against one another.

This can result in some unexpected and kind of weird Shiri’s scissors. Take the Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse: As the song is written, the male singer is trying to convince the female singer to stay the night by offering her a series of plausible excuses to do so; she kind of wants to but knows she shouldn’t, or at least that she’s expected not to. His tone is best described as playfully predatory.

That breaks people’s minds. Since there is no longer any socially acceptable category for culpable seduction, everyone tries to collapse the wave function into either “cute coming of age story” or “rape.” About ten years ago I heard a middle school choir (ages 11–14) perform the song with cigarettes and booze removed but sexual implications left altogether intact. On the other hand, people have been decrying the song’s radio play for years now on the grounds that it glorifies rape, which is the only moral category many people have for predatory sex.

Much of the yes-means-yes advocacy seemed to me to come from the same place. College girls had sex that they came to understand on some level was Not Okay. They (often correctly) accused college boys of exploiting them, and the boys (often correctly) pointed out that the sex was consensual. There is a natural temptation for everyone to claim innocence by projecting all the guilt onto the other party, but in this case the kids didn’t have a fighting chance: Their elders had robbed them of any moral categories outside “rape” and “not rape.”

So yes, I have known the Christian woman who sleeps with her boyfriend and, when asked, points out that this is what is expected of her to continue the relationship, and I acknowledge that this a real temptation placed upon her. I also know that she has a normal libido, and that on some level she was using the expectation as an excuse to do what she wanted to do. Her responsibility doesn’t render him innocent, and vice-versa.

I will certainly not claim to know how socially conservative secularists should navigate the current landscape. Both men and women have said that trying to do the right thing often feels like a sucker’s bet, and I believe them. I think that we in conservative churches can start by dating and marrying only sincere fellow believers, which we should be doing anyway. But that doesn’t address the underlying issue.

Availability bias is a hell of a drug. When we say all child stars go crazy, we are ignoring the vast majority who did not. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan come to mind because their wreckage was photogenic ("leave Britney alone!!"). We tend to ignore the thousands of former child actors who are now working as unremarkable real estate agents or middle-managers in the suburbs. If we look at the high-tier cohort from that era, we find people like Natalie Portman, Kenan Thompson, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They seem, by most accounts, to be functioning adults. They didn't have public meltdowns, and they didn't undergo a sudden, jarring pivot into hyper-sexualized branding.

This suggests that the "going crazy" outcome is not a universal law of child stardom, but rather a specific subset of outcomes driven by two things: the personality traits of the children (and parents) who seek high-level fame, and the specific economic demands of the transition from "adorable child" to "adult artist."

Consider the Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez examples. It might be very tempting to view their transition into hyper-sexualized imagery as a psychological rebellion against a father figure or a Disney-enforced childhood. But looking at this through a lens of market signaling, a different picture emerges.

If you are a child star, your brand is built on a specific type of innocence. This brand has a hard expiration date. By the time you are twenty, the Disney Girl persona is a depreciating asset. To survive in the industry, you have to execute a rebranding that is loud enough to signal to the market that you are no longer a child. If you do this subtly, nobody notices, and you simply fade away. If you do it loudly, you successfully kill the old brand and create space for a new one.

The majority of Miley Cyrus's fans today barely remember her cutesy Hannah Montana shtick. She quite successful pivoted, and has done pretty well for herself after the transition. Either way, she couldn't continue as HM indefinitely.

This is not necessarily a sign of "daddy issues" or clinical mental illness. It's a pretty rational response to a career-threatening bottleneck. It is the "I am an adult now" signal amplified to a level where the signal-to-noise ratio overcomes the public's lingering memory of you as a twelve-year-old. The fact that this rebranding often takes the form of hyper-sexuality is less about individual pathology and more about the fact that sexual maturity is the most legible, universal signal of adulthood available in our culture.

There is also a selection effect at play regarding who becomes a top-tier child star in the first place. High-level fame requires a specific type of drive (or perhaps a specific type of parental obsession, itself probably heritable) that may be correlated with higher-than-average rates of neuroticism or cluster B traits. We might be looking at a population that was already at higher risk for mental health struggles, which the industry then amplifies. This is different from saying fame causes the illness. It might just be that the people most likely to seek the spotlight are also the people most likely to struggle when the spotlight gets too hot.

I would also push back on the idea that these performers are just "doing what they’re told" by sleazy managers. While that certainly happens, it ignores the agency of the performers themselves. Many of these women are highly intelligent businesspeople who understand exactly what sells. They are navigating a landscape where the "male gaze" is both a source of revenue and a target for performative feminist critique. They are playing a complex game of triangulation. They provide the sexual imagery that the market demands, but they frame it as "empowerment" to satisfy the cultural gatekeepers of the prestige media.

(Case in point, Taylor Swift)

This isn't necessarily madness on the part of the performer. It is a highly sophisticated, if somewhat cynical, way of maximizing market share across two demographics: the "dudebros" who want the fanservice and the "woke" commentators who want the girlboss narrative. In other words, you get the horny gents, and you let their girlfriends convince themselves that this is somehow empowering.

Looking at this broadly, we've created a world where the most valuable currency is attention, and the most efficient way to get attention is to play in the space of sexual signaling while simultaneously denouncing the very people who are paying attention. It is a system that optimizes for friction. (Though I suppose if I were making their kind of money, I might be willing to trade a little bit of my own sanity for the privilege).

I'd just like to say, thank you for making an actual argument here. I can still tell that this is a topic you feel passionately about from the way you talk about it but you're expressing it without resorting to snark and sarcasm. And I actually share most of the same views as you, especially about the socially conservative society I would prefer being blown to bits. I'm not a mod here, but please, more of this.

Well, I suppose if you’re a pop singer who started out as a teenage girl and you aren’t explicitly Christian, keeping up your clueless romantic virgin schoolgirl persona becomes tiresome, limiting and cringe after you turn 21 or so in a society where premarital sex is normalized. Thankfully I’m not that knowledgeable about this entire sleazy subject but as far as I can tell, Britney Spears also had scarce intentions herself of maintaining her good girl image after a while.

(On a related note, do all such pop singers have sleazy old men a managers? I wonder.)

Because it became normalised first in sexual relationships, when men started asking for what they saw in porn.

Hold up. So where was it normalized first? Real life or porn?

Taylor Swift seems, to my limited knowledge, to have navigated the problem of getting older and remaining popular/a star without resorting to the "oops, all my clothes fell off!" stage.

Look at Pink, who was big, and now is not so big. She, too, went through the "yeah I'm empowered" unconventional fashion choices. She's still touring but is not, I think, as relevant as she was; her audience is getting older along with her. They're loyal, but the 20 year olds aren't flocking to her (if I'm wrong, please correct me). Whereas Swift seems to have managed to get those 20 year olds to be her audience as well.

Look, I don't think pop stars are very smart, and the managers and record producers do tend to older guys. See the 80s line of manufactured boy bands and girl singers churned out by the likes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman as songwriters/producers. And I do think that the career trajectory for the disposable pop girly does go through the "slutty is empowered" stage on the way to "you're 30 or older now, the teenagers aren't buying your records any more, the exit is that way" ending, because Sex Sells and 50 year old men know that hot slutty 20 year old girls will get press attention and publicity, and even better if it can be sold on the back of fake feminism.

Whereas Swift seems to have managed to get those 20 year olds to be her audience as well.

Taylor Swift is kind of sui generis because she’s the last mega-celebrity that the mono-culture ever produced. She got in right under the line, just before social media fractured the attention economy into a million little bubbles. I don’t think it’s possible for any new pop star today to reach that level of name recognition.

I don't think Taylor Swift or Pink ever had an early good modest girl image though.

Taylor swift started out with(and still makes money off of) a ‘girl next door’ vibe which is close enough.

Pink is kind of unusual in that she started with a highly sexualized aggressively edgy punk style and then in the mid 2010s aggressively pivoted to much more middle of the road family friendly pop-banger mileu.

Have you ever heard the song, “You Belong With Me”?

You're on the phone with your girlfriend, she's upset

She's going off about something that you said

'Cause she doesn't get your humor like I do

I'm in the room, it's a typical Tuesday night

I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like

And she'll never know your story like I do

But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts

She's Cheer Captain, and I'm on the bleachers

Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find

That what you're looking for has been here the whole time

If you could see that I'm the one who understands you

Been here all along, so why can't you see?

You belong with me, you belong with me

Walk in the streets with you in your worn-out jeans

I can't help thinking this is how it ought to be

Laughing on a park bench, thinking to myself

"Hey, isn't this easy?"

It’s hardly even subtext. It’s just text.

Pink no, but that was Taylor's whole thing. Kinda still is.

Thankfully I’m not that knowledgeable about this entire sleazy subject but as far as I can tell, Britney Spears also had scarce intentions herself of maintaining her good girl image after a while.

I'm reminded of Sam Sheridan's quip in A Fighter's Heart where he noticed that a major risk factor in deaths in the boxing ring was family members in the corner. A fighter's brother, father, uncle was much more likely to keep sending him back out there until he died than was a professional coach.

I suppose this is a reference to her stage parents?

Managing female sexuality is a sleazeball man’s game, and female pop stars are selling female sexuality- not as a product, as a fantasy.

I don't know when it happened exactly, but, if you look at her current social media posting Britney Spears is clearly clinically mentally ill. The South Park episode is a good summary of what fame did to her. Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez seem like purer examples of the "I'm grown up now, fuck you dad!" type, with triple daddy issues in Cyrus's case.

but the tl;dr is that all child stars go crazy or disappear. Props to Macaulay Culkin for pulling his life back together.

Fair distillation in my book.

Its crazy how we've come around to the "porn is bad (from the feminist perspective) but women should be rewarded for producing it" (see: Bonnie Blue) point of view as a seeming cultural default.

Then add the additional wrinkle where men who are excessive porn consumers (where 'excessive' is a moving target, mind), or otherwise admit to partaking are still ostracized... even though the action of consuming porn is, I'd say, objectively less degrading and disgusting than the acts involved in producing the hardcore stuff.

There's sort of an implicit "if you're a male porn addict you're pathetic and its good that your money is going to women, even though we wish women would instead choose to not produce porn at all" subtext or something.

And on top of that women can read the most egregiously pornographic books and make them best-sellers... and we're all pretty aware that they're getting off to these things in private, but once again they can claim this makes them 'bookworms' and get a certain amount of adulation from admitting it.

There's an absolutely fair argument "real porn is produced by real people and depicts genuine suffering" vs. words on a page.

But as far as the psychological impact on the consumer I'd wager they're quite similar.

The fully cynical view is that the women are wonderful effect just dominates all cultural narratives. Human psychology is bent against criticizing attractive women, and so if women are engaging in [taboo/disgusting acvitity] maybe many humans will just contort their thought processes to find that thing really good actually, as long as its women doing it.

That's not the explanation I'd run with, I think it just frames the issue properly.

“We”?

There are two groups, split on unsurprising demographic lines. The young and unattached are more laissez-faire; parents are mysteriously less comfortable with legitimizing any sort of sex work. Progressive, conservative.

But that split is mostly about production. There’s broad, non-partisan agreement that porn consumption is low-status. That part’s the cultural default.

I’ll agree that romance novels sort of play by different rules, but I think you’re overselling it a bit. There’s a different generational gap, too. But I’m not really inclined to trawl the NYT bestsellers for proof.

Its crazy how we've come around to the "porn is bad (from the feminist perspective) but women should be rewarded for producing it" (see: Bonnie Blue) point of view as a seeming cultural default.

It occurs to me that this default seems much less absurd if you realize that the cultural default is also willfully incentive-blind. It's an uneasy truce between people who don't think of porn as bad from the feminist perspective, they just think of all kinds of things it strongly correlates with as bad, and people who don't think that they're rewarding women for producing porn, they think they're being respectful to women who've been exploited by it.

There is a far more basic dynamic at play there, which is also the reason why sex toys for women are a much bigger and less stigmatised market: because men's value is measured by their ability to convince women to have sex with them, men who obtain sexual gratification without the need to do so broadcast to the world that they are losers.

There is no obvious counterpart of this for women - given that the counterpart animal-brain valuation is often stated as "measured by their ability to exercise choice and reject even high-value men", and the animal need is taken to be for resources and validation rather than sex, perhaps the distaff version of the coomer is something like a streamer maintaining a simp army by way of heavy plastic surgery/makeup/AI retouching/voice changers. I do get the sense that the embarrassment around women's no-makeup high school photos is a bit similar to the embarrassment around men's browser history.

There is no obvious counterpart of this for women

Cats. The female social equivalent of porn is cats. It’s a hyperstimulus that satisfies a biological drive that the person would have gotten social esteem for had they successfully achieved it “the right way”. In this case the biological drive is having children and being a mother. And you see similar stereotypes about the excessive user being creepy and filthy (the cat lady hoarder crammed into her apartment with her ten cats and a box of wine).

I don't buy it. Despite the stereotype and the mild snickering, nobody is cagey or secretive about their cat-keeping habits.

that the person would have gotten social esteem for had they successfully achieved it “the right way”

Would they? In 2026?

I think everyone is quietly going to think that a mother of four is less pathetic than a cat/dog mom of four, but now days they probably would be more careful about saying it out loud.

Dogs are a much better equivalent; small breeds in particular are just like slightly less verbal toddlers.

Guess what the dog mom stereotype is about…

Its an odd clash between our primal lizard/ape brain and our more economizing higher mammal brain that we seem to be well aware that "sex" is cheap in the abstract, you can find it with just a little effort and risk, and if you have some cash can acquire it, in varying degrees of quality.

Got specific names for it and everything. High end "sugar babies," low end "lot lizards."

So its not like some hard-to-acquire thing that has intrinsic value due to its rarity.

But... acquiring it from decent-looking women without having to pay out for it (up front, especially) usually means you're an absolute high-value stud who will literally be the envy of other men.

Status-seeking interacts with sexual politics in some odd ways here. If I have, I dunno, about 4-5k, I could spend the night with some of the most gorgeous women on the planet (so my research suggests). But I don't think that would, by itself, afford me any extra status points, and would in many contexts lower my status.

So its a commodity, but also something way, way more important.

I don't know, in the 4-5k example the circumstance that it would presumably be a financial strain for you does a lot of work here. It's one thing if you can eat rice and beans for two months to afford a quickie, and another when this is "easy solution if/when the urge arises" pocket change. (Compare owning a Ferrari to spending a similar amount for a 1h test drive for your birthday.) Similarly, we don't have particular reason to assume that any of Genghis Khan's baby mommas entered the arrangement particularly enthusiastically (as opposed to being bought, either directly or in units of the liquid asset that were the lives of his hordes), but when people speak of the fraction of modern-day people who descend from him, it still rings with some sort of grudging admiration.

On the flip side, the male advantage in acquiring resources has also eroded (especially anywhere near the median, rather than around various outliers; the overwhelming maleness of Bill Gates's economic bracket is irrelevant to the life of most women), and yet the ancestral patterns persist.

I guess I'm just saying, I could pay money to a hooker and then say "I banged an absolute 10/10 last night!" and be completely honest, pull out a photo showing her on my arm, and this might gain me some status points with the boys until it comes out that she is in fact a high-class hooker. Then all that bravado dissipates.

Buttttt, if I pull that same hooker with my own wiles and charm I can say "hey guys lol I banged a 10/10 escort last night without paying" then that might get me even more status because I just demonstrated value above and beyond being wealthy that can overcome even a working girl's cynicism.

Or so I'd expect. Thus its not the sex-having itself that is the flex, its the "girls find me attractive/interesting enough to give it up for free" part. Absolute social proof.

(for me, I'm genuinely at the point where sex doesn't mean much at all unless its with someone I have a true intimacy with, and so guys flexing their conquests leaves me mildly envious but not particularly threatened).

Got specific names for it and everything. High end "sugar babies," low end "lot lizards."

In OLD and social media, "sugar babies" will refrain from disclosing as such until you get their number and take the conversation to other channels, lest they get banned from the platform. While rarer, they often appear indistinguishable from normal girls too, just the usual attractive young woman's assortment of bikini pics, thirst traps, nights out with their girlfriends, pics of them in a cocktail dress at a two-person table in an expensive restaurant (who's taking the photo?).

If you have no interest in "sugar babies" like me, this represents time having been wasted talking to such a girl. Sometimes in the past when I've been traveling abroad or preparing to travel abroad (and thus chatting with girls in their local language) is to make lemonade out of lemons and amuse myself.

I say abroad because this doesn't work in English-speaking countries since I can't play dumb in terms of language familiarity the same way. Basically they'd say they're a [positive euphemism for a sex worker] and I'd "innocently" inquire if that means [less positive euphemism for a sex worker]. The equivalent in English would be something like, once we've been text messaging or WhatsApping or whatever for awhile:

Her: btw... im a sb and looking for something mutual
Me: what's an sb
Her: sugar baby
Me: what does that mean
*beat*
Me: ohhh is that like a prostitute?
Her: no not like that!!

And hoe maddening ensues. Even female sex workers are quite defensive and sensitive about their Wonderfulness.

Nowadays, I'm all-too-tiresome'd out to entertain myself like the above and will just leave it at that after the initial reveal.

Not really endorsing your post, but there is a REAL problem with women refusing to advertise their 'true' status in any way that might give up the game before a guy invests attention in her. Even being on a dating app isn't proof positive that she's available and serious.

Girls will have dozens of photos on Insta of just herself in various states of dress and undress, and you'll only find out she has a boyfriend after you've been texting sporadically back and forth for a month (happened to me recently).

Of course the wannabe SBs and the OF purveyors want to hide that until they think they've got you invested enough to slide down the sales funnel.

Yet even 'honest' girls will elide their current relationship status insofar as they'll neglect to mention their ongoing FWB situations or that they're still pining over a guy back home and they'd drop everything to move back there with him (also happened to me). Why not, you know, include him in some photos or at least acknowledge that he's there?

A guy might not know exactly what sort of woman he pulled until 3-6 months into the interaction. Its maddening.

When I learned that the Germans used to have a traditional method for women to advertise their availability I got kinda mad that we don't use similar systems any more.

As a result, it is utterly rational for a guy to assume there's a hidden caveat when a girl 'presents' as single but isn't really open about what that means to her. And that means withholding investment until he is reassured she's actually available and isn't about to spring the "please pay my rent this month" trap.

I like this comment because it sets up and interesting model.

Want a thing and don't care about status games? Buy it. Get rich, get what you want.

Want status but don't care about money? Get famous through any means necessary.

Want a thing and also care about status? Play whatever status game you want, and get to the level of wealth you need to acquire the thing.

But, of course, we see the hacks all over the place.

If you have lots of money - like, lots and lots of it - you acquire at least some status. If you have a lot of status (fame) you can pretty easily acquire money, perhaps even lots and lots of it.

It's that "both" model that is tricky. You want both status and money but you have to balance out one with the other lest you lose one or the other.

I don't know. This was off the top of my head, but it's interesting to play with.

I like what you're laying down.

Minmaxing seems to be in vogue now.

Nobody really wants to do the slow, steady, 'reliable' path. And, granted, I think there are fewer of those nowadays, given the pace of change.

You're 'losing' if you only bought index funds rather than YOLOing on NVDA.

One can also compare and contrast how, for example, Billionaires like Soros, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos have spent their fortunes.

A simple illustration of your point is the fear of the "Gold-Digger" woman who only loves you for your wealth. So guys sometimes go to pains to conceal the extent of the wealth to see if they can land a girl without ostentatious displays.

and then... some guys go ALL IN on ostentatious displays, going into debt to give the appearance of wealth and hoping to fool women long enough to lock them down.

People can arguably choose which games to actively compete in, and their particular goals in it will inform strategy.

But if you're not implementing a minmax strat, playing for the 'meta,' you can feel like you're losing constantly in the short term.

But if you're not implementing a minmax strat, playing for the 'meta,' you can feel like you're losing constantly in the short term.

Absolutely. So what matters more is which game you choose to play. Finite and Infinite Games does a great job of describing the two types of primary social games. This is one of my most recommended books.

Not to bring it back to Jesus, but ... to bring it back to Jesus, the entire "game" chosen there is sacrificing the fame / wealth / comfort of this world for the infinite comfort of the next. From a pure game theoretic standpoint, it's a total no-brainer. If not only the expected return but the guaranteed return to one course of action is literally infinite bliss forever, you go all in on that. For people who choose not to believe, they are still making a somewhat rational decision in their pursuit of wealth/status in this life. The tricky part is for lukewarm believers - C&E beige Catholics, whishy washy mainline protestants, cultural Jews, secular Muslims etc. who "believe" yet also hedge by pursuing wealth and status on earth. It's actually that exact non-minmax you're talking about and they'll likely get caught in the middle one way or another. And then, you know ,go to Hell forever.

I need to read that one.

Added to my library pull list.

Funny to bring up the Jesus thing. Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) is very near death, and he has claimed the intention to convert to Christianity.

Leaving aside whether that is a true conversion under Christian doctrine, its a ridiculous approach to minmaxing to live life a certain way all up until the very last moments then hit the "I want eternal bliss" button at the end, consciously trying to stave it off rather than just, you know, doing it.

Women have a particularly stark issue here, where part of their ideal strat for maximizing happiness is to have kids, which has a fairly sharp biological cutoff, so one would think they should try to satisfy that element early on. But cultural advice is to get other goals out of the way first, then play a game of baby fever chicken in your late 20's/early 30's. The tradeoff probably seems reasonable looking at it from the perspective of a 20-year-old.

I've noticed several female friends and acquaintances who developed their professional careers and now are just sliding under the fertility wire by having a kid (twins, in one case) with some guy who... I mean he's in the picture, but they are distinctly NOT married to him.

Time will tell how that turns out for them, but its also a bit unfair to the child, you ask me. One of the issues with minmaxing is you forget that other people's interests are entangled with your own.

and he has claimed the intention to convert to Christianity.

Relevant Simpsons clip

You can't fake true, in the heart intent. If Scott Adams is doing this because he is, all of a sudden, afraid of going to hell, then 1) He's acting out of fear (sinful) and 2) Is not acting out of a true love for God (also sin). All that being said, I don't actually believe that all deathbed repentances are invalid. Sometimes, someone is called in those last few moments. While it may seem like this is the ultimate "Get out of jail free" card, the reality would probably be that the person, while truly called to Christ and therefore happy to (after a stop in purgatory) go to paradise, is also full of remorse for not having Him in their life for all of their other years. Imagine having had an entire life you thought was happy and then, moments before death, discovering the ultimate in music / art / passion. It probably wouldn't actually be that enjoyable as you'd be full of regret.

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The general social consensus seems to be that complaining about anything pretty women do is low status and petty, and complaining about anything ugly women do in any way is needlessly mean-spirited. It’s generally understood that many women are needlessly petty, but for a man to point that out openly is itself generally dismissed as a sign of pettiness.

I think it can be done if you're a high status enough male and if the framing is correct.

I can't think of a good example for the pure high status male, but, for framing, the host of the "Whatever" podcast, when he wants to, does this well. Unfortunately, that show has mostly turned into a circus where he invites on OnlyFans models and then literally guys from Andrew Tate's posse to flame each other. If you can find clips, however, where it's just the host and usually 1 - 3 OnlyFans girls, he actually does a passable job of framing he issue as one of personal integrity and self-worth versus instant gratification.

Yep.

I once again point out how Andrew Tate 'gets away' with it by cultivating such a ridiculously outsized villain persona that this critique just rolls off him.

But it'd be really nice if you didn't have to adopt a villain persona to be taken 'seriously' rather than dismissed outright for broaching the forbidden topic.

Even couching it as genuine care for womens' wellbeing gets vilified.

Uh, do these women bragging about how much they read come out and say ‘yeah, it’s all porn’? I’m pretty sure they don’t and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.

I’m also not aware of pornstars getting much adulation(as opposed to stuff- they probably do generally out earn their well behaved peers, at least when you correct for class).

... kinda?

You have to go pretty far before any woman is going to use 'beanflicker novel' or even 'it's erotica', but Reddit's /r/romancebook has a first page with Kink and Sex Acts Megathread - Knotting, FMC and MMC has something erotic happen in front of them and it makes them both “snap”, and Mmc fucks fmc thinking she is his girlfriend. I'm not an absolute expert in the field, but even the M/M stuff is written for and often by women's consumption, and about the point where the protagonist secretly begins taking contraceptives so the fuckening can continue, there's not a lot of fig leaf.

(To be clear, I'm not judging, here! ... well, except in the giving some of the books individual ratings, and considering if I want to drop some furry names in the megathread.)

Yes, there's still some stigma about this stuff: a woman reading Morning Glory Milking Farm (cw: not-great romance art, incredibly heavy-handed innuendo in picture, the book is bizarrely vanilla) on the train is going to get similar looks as a guy leafing through the original edition Savant and Sorcerer (cw: woman in swimsuit-level-nudity). But you're not going to see a Fifty Shades of Gray For Men make the front pages, nor will some random male-focused shipper fanfic smutty fanfic get a full film. Even the for-gay-guys equivalents are a lot more heavily policed: there's no Magic Mike-but-actually-gay.

Most people talk about it through euphemism in wildly public spaces; spice, heat, the citrus scale, so on. But they're still pretty overt about it, with over half of this book list having explicit smutty sex scenes (3 'pepper' or higher). Maybe that's less of a deal because it's a mostly written environment. But it's not something that's hard to spot.

I'm more skeptical that this is bad. I've made and will continue to make the argument that even pretty kinky or genre-focused smutty or smut-adjacent works can have broader meaning or allow deeper insight, and that even works that are just read for gratification are fine whether they're smut or milsci-fi (even if gustibus non disputandum meets some discomfort with WH40k books). But it's a thing, and the difference in expectations by gender is a thing.

I was in the waiting room of a doctor's office yesterday and my wife noticed a number of....spicy? (I think was the term) books on the bookshelf. None of the current monster/dark fantasy stuff thats all the rage right now, but absolutely text based pornograrphy for women. About a dozen of them. The exact same shelf, immediately adjacent to the smut books, were three different editions of the Bible. This was an office in a Catholic hospital.

... and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.

Its impolite because its only men that seem to take issue, and its inappropriate for men to criticize women. Full stop.

I've left out the absolute best part imo. The overwelming majority of these books are written in a non-omniscient* first-person, producing an entire generation of women "readers" who struggle with, or fail completely, to parse the meaning of third-person prose. They can't keep track of who is doing what; literally can't tell who the subject/object of the sentence is and get so confused they give up on the book. The meme is "3rd person is immediate DNF" (did not finish).

*non-omniscient in that the main PoV character often lacks the knowledge of what the main PoV character is thinking or planning.

https://tiktok.com/discover/i-cant-read-third-person

https://old.reddit.com/r/Barnesandnoble/comments/1lhiwrs/third_person_difficulties/

https://old.reddit.com/r/romanceunfiltered/comments/1nys2bs/illiteracy_driving_first_person_pov_trend_in/

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4854296-struggle-reading-books-in-third-person

The exact same shelf, immediately adjacent to the smut books, were three different editions of the Bible.

I wonder which book they were most often opened to....

Uh, do these women bragging about how much they read come out and say ‘yeah, it’s all porn’? I’m pretty sure they don’t and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.

Ha.

Hahah.

HAahaahah.

Not only that, they're trying to normalize it by suggesting men should learn from it. Check out the likes on the subject video.

Here's at least one example of a lady showing off her reading habits. 45.2 Million views. 124k loves on twitter.

Guess the content of most of those books.

Of course, there's plenty of people roasting her for the particular choice of novel. Just far more coming to her defense.

I've also delved a tiny bit into so-called "Booktok."

Try it sometime!

I’m also not aware of pornstars getting much adulation

Bonnie Blue has gotten to go on mainstream shows for interviews now.

Her own mother is on record as tacitly approving.

Basically, she might be one of the most 'well-known' (infamy, if not actual fame) British women in the world these days.

Hard to find any 'official' condemnation of her actions, but a lot of manosphere (Tate included) commentary, and tons of people making money off her indirectly or directly. Bali did arrest her which she of course turned into more publicity.

She's fueled a mini attention-industry and every ounce of attention is just prolonging her presence in the Zeitgeist.

Will AI slop actually change anything? The sheer volume of porn and attractive women thirst posting on instagram is so vast that even if the volume is increased by orders of magnitude it won't change anything.

post-monogamist society where women are normally trying to out-slut one another in various ways to compete for the sexual attention of high-status men

Does this actually work? The female status game seems fundamentally broken because women are competing for status with games that won't lead to relationship or career success. Does spending lots of time on social media actually increase the chance of getting a high value man? Instagram's user base leans heavily female to begin with. Writing mediocre slop on linkedin while friend-requesting large numbers of men seems far more efficient than posting breakfast pics on Instagram.

Do the thirst trap pics actually lead to quality dates on online dating? A reasonably attractive woman in a fancy dress is probably not going to have a more difficult time finding a decent man on hinge than a woman posting bikini pictures.

It seems like women are driving themselves to literal insanity playing status games in terms of shopping, competitive travelling and social media without actually getting much in return. Machu Pichu pics and bikini pics on Instagram, fast fashion and keeping up with micro trends and expensive handbags are largely irrelevant for women's success in life.

I don't think they are actually fighting for male attention. I think this is ingroup status signalling and woman trying to be more popular among women. The prize seems less tangible.

I don't think they are actually fighting for male attention. I think this is ingroup status signalling and woman trying to be more popular among women. The prize seems less tangible.

I agree. This (and mobile gambling / sports betting) is the only "social media is destroying the world" narrative I buy. Political / ideological "radicalization" has been more or less debunked (it's the 1-5% of online political hyper posters who actually get real weird). "Phone addiction" while real in a habitual but not neurochemical sense is mostly a matter of self discipline and cultivating a dynamic and varied lifestyle.

But intrasexual competition for status is hardwired into both males and females. The difference being that for females, a lot more of the status is derived from attention markets - what other people think of you relative to other women. For men, it's more about quantitative and hierarchical absolute performance rather than a group voting / market dynamic. Far less ambiguity.

This is where social media really does "hack" the brain. It is an always on, 24/7 "who is the popular girl" machine that requires constant updates and vigilance from all users. The only want to win is not to play or - as in the Bonnie Blue case - to pursue such an extreme strategy that you'll have very few direct competitors, but may, perversely, actually lose status the more you exploit it.

It seems like women are driving themselves to literal insanity playing status games in terms of shopping, competitive travelling and social media without actually getting much in return. Machu Pichu pics and bikini pics on Instagram, fast fashion and keeping up with micro trends and expensive handbags are largely irrelevant for women's success in life.

I don't think they are actually fighting for male attention. I think this is ingroup status signalling and woman trying to be more popular among women. The prize seems less tangible.

I've seen the argument that a lot of this is women picking up their trends downstream of what GAY MEN are saying is 'in.' I.e. gay men are gatekeepers in fashion, media, travel, and dating, to some large degree. So their tastes (and attitudes!) are thus picked up by those most attentive to such things.

I think there's truth there, and no, not some large 'conspiracy'. Just a disconnect. If women keep doing things they believe men like (as taught by gay men) and yet do not get (straight) men they actually want interested in them... something something definition of insanity.

By and large, Straight men are pretty directly signalling "We like tig ol' bitties and approachable, kind personalities, with the idealized representation of femininity being Sydney Sweeney." Meanwhile Sabrina Carpenter is who gets aggressively marketed and celebrated.

All a girl needs to really appeal to even a decently high-value guy is be a 'beautiful mid' who expresses some interest in his hobbies, and isn't a pain to be around.

(You can spot this dynamic in practice with the "SEC Couples" trend).

By and large, Straight men are pretty directly signalling "We like tig ol' bitties and approachable, kind personalities, with the idealized representation of femininity being Sydney Sweeney." Meanwhile Sabrina Carpenter is who gets aggressively marketed and celebrated.

Okay, I'm not that familiar with celebrity culture, but is Sydney Sweeney well-known for having a more approachable and kind personality than Sabrina Carpenter? It looks like you're using political signaling as a proxy measure here.

You’re not being shallow enough.

Sabrina Carpenter's most popular songs are basically about exasperation and/or toying with men. The title of her latest album is at least a little ironic.

Sydney Sweeney likes to show off her boobs and wear blue jeans.

Does this actually work? The female status game seems fundamentally broken because women are competing for status with games that won't lead to relationship or career success.

The alternative would be, I dunno, learning how to cook, being pleasant, or just basically not being a troublesome harpy. The sort of things that are completely countercultural today and come across as hopelessly cringe in the eyes of the modal single woman.

This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.

I think you can see a particularly interesting example hiding in the recent updates to the Francesca Gino affair. If you haven't heard of this, the wiki summary is a good overview: Francesca Gino was a high-flying behavioral science professor at HBS with all the standard TED talk/pop-sci book deal-type accolades. However, there were some statistical issues in her papers that were investigated by a blog Data Colada (run by the researchers who invented the term "p-hacking"!). Data Colada eventually wrote a four-part series of posts arguing that these papers were based on falsified data and the resulting scandal led to Gino losing tenure at Harvard. In between these raw events, there was also some pretty crazy drama; for example, a graduate student being threatened and blacklisted for originally pointing out the inconsistencies.

The most telling piece of the extra drama was that at one point, Gino decided to sue Data Colada for libel instead of directly giving a refutation of their analysis---your interpretation might vary, but this really felt like running to another arena where she could win through discussions of procedure and legal games instead of being confident in her ability to get vindication on scientific merit.

Now for the hidden culture war: while the scientific community seemed pretty convinced that Data Colada's case was ironclad (if you have time to read the full blog posts, you can check this yourself too---the section "Excel files contain multitudes" seems particularly damning), Gino did have many defenders outside science. Like Gino's self-defense, the other defenses are fascinating and, to me, very revealing. As a older representatives, you can see the reporting in the MBA-focused newsletter Poets and Quants (example) or a series of podcasts by Lawrence Lessig. Much more recently, Bill Ackman (relevant to here as a major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay) made a long twitter post explaining why he believes Gino is innocent.

If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated. There's also something more to the off-vibe I feel reading them: see these quotes from Lessig's second podcast interviewing Gino:

Again, it wasn’t just me or my lab. It was everybody in the field having the same type of practices and not exactly thinking through...

I was teaching a new course that became a first-year course for the MBA students. So it’s over a 1000s of them on inclusive leadership, and so it was a lot of work to create the materials. I was also chosen as the course head. That means that you’re managing eight professors. Eight or more professors were teaching different sections of the course. So it was a very intensive period, from a teaching perspective.

The mindset seems to almost be "She was doing all the things she was supposed to do, working so hard playing the academic career game exactly right when suddenly people changed the rules out from under her. Look at how unfair this was!". Nowhere does there seem to be any realization that the point of science is not actually the career game---you're actually supposed to further the project of learning truths about the world. If you actively impede it instead, it doesn't matter how well you were following the game and you should be punished very exceptionally!

This is the deeper culture war I was talking about. To some people, the point of a career is to add value to world, to create something that benefits others, achieve some mission, etc. However, to others, the point is to play a game as best as you can and climb a ladder of credentials and accolades determined by some competitive rules and procedures society pre-decided. The Gino case suggests fitting archetypes for both sides: a research scientist purely interested in their field vs. a careerist MBA or lawyer. Obviously from how I'm framing this, I'm extremely partisan towards one side of this culture war---so much so that I actually feel much more strongly about it than the political one and can't write this post anywhere close to neutrally. The "lawyer"-side viewpoint feels alien and evil, completely incompatible with a thriving society that can actually technologically progress.

What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.

The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?

I strongly agree with your point of view. The point of science is to increase our understanding of the world, so it is not a zero sum competition to assign status.

Of course, there exists also what Feynman calls cargo cult science. People who occupy fields which make pretenses of scientific rigor but are actually just bullshitting may very well feel that all the application of statistics etc is just performative.

Being a scientist means leading mankind down the path towards truth, typically zero to one baby steps at a time. Falsifying data -- to decide that you would rather make larger steps than walk in the right direction -- is the ultimate defection from that mission. The professor who fucks his students or the doctor who experiments on PoWs may be worse human beings, but the falsifier of data is the worse scientist.

Nobody is forced to compete in a field which makes any pretenses of scientific rigor. If you don't like statistics, publish on art history. But if you use the language of science in your publications while falsifying your data, you should be expelled and disgraced and spend the rest of your days in some menial job where you can do no further harm.

A similar nonchalance is sometimes seen in defense of academics whose ghostwriters copy paste their thesis from other publications. After all, a lot of people did some cheating in school, and can't see what the big deal is. But to the (debatable) degree that an academic title means anything, it means that you sat down on your own ass and wrote your thesis. Take that away, and there is literally nothing left, and we might as well allow parents to christen their infants 'PhD' instead of 'Kevin' or 'Mary'.

I don't know whether or not she's a fraud, but she's a social psychologist, so I assume so. What I can point out is that, from a lawyer-side viewpoint, and I mean literal lawyers, the process she went through is so staggeringly unjust that even if she's 100% obviously guilty it will still shock and horrify a lawyer. Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field, and have turned that into running deranged kangaroo courts. It's of a piece with how they handle sexual assault allegations, to give an example with an opposite culture war valence (amusingly, Gino is suing under the same Title IX used to justify those star chambers).

The more I hear about university politics, the more I conclude that they have too much power. Their authority needs to be separated into isolated chunks. They should not be teaching courses and then evaluating their own performance by giving exams as well. They should not be setting tuition fees and also collecting them. They should not be both centers of mass-education for undergrads and also the education of the elite few who go on to PhD and Master's courses.

Most of all, the powers they have which resemble the powers of the judicial system in any way need to be taken away. Universities are not courts of law, they do not have the accountability, moral fiber, or training to do law properly, and any incident which requires the intervention of a court should be handled by an actual court of law.

Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field,

I don't see how universities have more power over their employees than any other employer. They can fire (and sort of blackball) an employee, but so can any other employer.

Students, on the other hand, lose an insane investment if they get kicked out. So I agree there.

As a lawyer I just want to mention that not all lawyers adhere to what you call the "lawyer"-side viewpoint. In particular, trial litigation tends to be highly meritocratic because you are constantly going head-to-head against other attorneys in hearings and trials. Being good at your job and having reputation for credibility goes a long way.

I would actually say that Law is one of the most meritocratic fields over the long run, in that while the really elite levels are gatekept behind prestigious degrees, you can still put out a shingle and work and build a base of clientele and advance. There are local lawyers pulling down excellent livings in any region of 100,000 people. Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.

A good lawyer who gets bad grades at a mediocre law school probably won't reach SCOTUS, he can still end up a trial judge or a partner at a very profitable law firm. A great chemist who misses out on professional and academic opportunities teaches at the high school.

and build a base of clientele and advance

Do you know if there are any good stats on what percent of lawyers are making excellent livings after they take some time to advance? New lawyer salaries have been scarily bimodal for decades now, but it's hard to tell the extent to which that's a career-long problem rather than something the lower half of the distribution just has to work their way out of over 5 or 10 years.

I'm trying to find data on it but I'm not succeeding quickly. Entry level wages have been bimodal, but the up-or-out nature of big law means that a lot of those highly-paid associates are gone within two to four years, and some for jobs where they (adjusting for inflation) they will never make more than they did early on at biglaw. Surveys report that 20% of associates leave their firms annually, though some are lateral to another firm. And of course a big part of the bimodalism has to do with the strong preference among elite professional degree holders for urban living; too few are willing or able to move to Cleveland, let alone Lancaster or Wyoming, to advance their careers.

But a small percentage of lawyers advancing their careers after failing at earlier prestige games doesn't necessarily mean that the system isn't meritocratic, it might tell us that a small percentage of good lawyers are being "thrown away" by the earlier screening systems.

I can't quantify it easily, but looking around at mid career lawyers, there is a definite path both down and up for lawyers based on talent. There are people I know who made big law and now aren't even practicing, and people I know who are making partner at prominent small town firms and pulling down a decent living now, which will improve considerably when the boomers have the courtesy to die off and free up a lot of work.

Even take a small city local DAs office as an example. Dauphin County, where Harrisburg is located, will hire young ADAs out of schools like Dusquesne and Penn State and Weidner with mediocre grades. The entry level wage is low, probably $60-70k these days. The experienced average is like $175k and the DA makes in the $200k range with a lot of local prestige to go with it. The Dauphin County DA went to Widener, started as an ADA thirty years ago, and now is the DA. There's obviously political elements to becoming DA, both office politics and electoral politics, but for the most part the way you become DA is by having at least some degree of talent for law.

None of this is perfect, there's still a ton of early career gatekeeping and prestige games, especially around the highest end jobs. But we're not comparing it to perfection, just to the example offered by OP: research science. If you're a research scientist without a university or industry affiliation, there's not a very comparable way to advance and revive your career.

For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.

I think it does acknowledge the existence of competence; it simply argues that an IQ test would be more cost-effective than years of education (remember that a lot of the use of tertiary degrees and even secondary degrees as proxies for competence is based on education in irrelevant subjects to the actual job requirements), and unlaundered carve-outs (if one chooses to use them for political reasons) would be more cost-effective than laundered ones.

The top line doesn't really represent the rest of the post.

What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.

The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?

Its possible for a job to be both meritocratic, and selected by status games. It happens anytime a job can be done to a sufficient degree by a large pool of candidates. There has to be some kind of alternate selection criteria. Some of these jobs might even adopt what look like anti-meritocratic sorting mechanisms.

Imagine a toll booth operator job where you basically just need to watch cars drive by and pay automatically. Maybe sometimes you hit a button to let someone through when the automated payment system gets messed up and should have let someone through. Generally you are doing nothing for 8 hour shifts. Almost anyone could take this job. 100 people apply for the position, you only have one opening to fill. If you were interested in the public good you yourself might implement a restriction like 'no smart people can have this job, they can actually use their brain to help the world instead'. If you were selfish and corrupt you might offer the job up for auction, that some percentage of the pay ends up going to you instead of the actual job candidate, or you just get a flat up front payment. Or maybe you have to sit in the toll booth with this person so you just pick the funniest and most likeable person. Even if you just decide to draw the name out of a hat, the final process for selecting the job candidate is not meritocratic.

So what happens when the job is much harder like "Harvard professor" and there are still 100 candidates for just one position. I'd imagine its much of the same thing, the job candidate is going to be picked on non-meritocratic factors, because the merit based filters have already been applied and they were still left with a large pool of candidates. Its also my belief that the larger the candidate pool left after merit filtering, the less a job will look like it is "merit based", regardless of how strict the merit based filtering was. A million qualified candidates applied for one professorship position and you know whoever gets that position got it because of political connections / nepotism / race favoritism / etc. Three qualified applied candidates for one professorship position, and you feel that they probably gave it to the most qualified person.

Imagine a toll booth operator job where you basically just need to watch cars drive by and pay automatically. Maybe sometimes you hit a button to let someone through when the automated payment system gets messed up and should have let someone through. Generally you are doing nothing for 8 hour shifts. Almost anyone could take this job. 100 people apply for the position, you only have one opening to fill. If you were interested in the public good you yourself might implement a restriction like 'no smart people can have this job, they can actually use their brain to help the world instead'. If you were selfish and corrupt you might offer the job up for auction, that some percentage of the pay ends up going to you instead of the actual job candidate, or you just get a flat up front payment. Or maybe you have to sit in the toll booth with this person so you just pick the funniest and most likeable person. Even if you just decide to draw the name out of a hat, the final process for selecting the job candidate is not meritocratic.

So what happens when the job is much harder like "Harvard professor" and there are still 100 candidates for just one position. I'd imagine its much of the same thing, the job candidate is going to be picked on non-meritocratic factors, because the merit based filters have already been applied and they were still left with a large pool of candidates. Its also my belief that the larger the candidate pool left after merit filtering, the less a job will look like it is "merit based", regardless of how strict the merit based filtering was. A million qualified candidates applied for one professorship position and you know whoever gets that position got it because of political connections / nepotism / race favoritism / etc. Three qualified applied candidates for one professorship position, and you feel that they probably gave it to the most qualified person.

I'm not saying you are completely wrong, but I think it's worth pointing out that the difference between a toll collector (in your analogy) who is truly great and one who is merely qualified is not all that noticeable or consequential compared to the difference between a college professor who is truly great and one who is merely "qualified." Probably most of us here have had the misfortune of taking a class with an affirmative action professor and therefore have witnessed just how bad a "qualified" professor can be.

From my experience at university the student preferred professors were not preferred by the university because each group just had a different idea of a good professor. Nothing to do with affirmative action. Teaching quality vs grant proposal quality.

Multiple axis of "merit" just makes the problem worse, because it just means that are more "qualified" people for the position, even if they are only partially qualified.

Is that true? I'd argue one of the prerequisites for effective meritocracy is a swift and effective method of performance measurement.

In toll collecting and many other private enterprise positions, that kind of measurement is typically easy thanks to revenue. Tollbooths are simple enough that it probably doesn't work for an average and elite performer, but let's say we're comparing bad to good, one of McNamara's morons against a regular high school graduate. In such a situation, the moron would stick out within a month or less and be fired.

But for a professor? If they're bad at teaching, the university won't even care. And the only reason this Gino person was fired wasn't because of bad research, but outright fraud that took decades to unearth.

Is that true? I'd argue one of the prerequisites for effective meritocracy is a swift and effective method of performance measurement.

It certainly can't hurt.

But for a professor? If they're bad at teaching, the university won't even care.

Agreed, but at the same time, it might not even be that easy to swiftly and effectively measure how good the person is at teaching.

Thank you for this post. It is something that really annoys me about the affirmative action debate. Both sides adopt a fairness approach (ie it is fair to adjust for past sins; how is it fair to punish someone who didn’t engage in any past sin). Both sides seemingly ignore that the position / job isn’t the end goal but the output of the position / job is the end goal. That is, the sides seem to focus on distributional issues while ignoring productivity.

I dont think that is true. Anti-AA folks with say that is both unfair to the candidates, but also unfair to customers and shareholders. Particularly with government positions, anti-AA advocates have long said it is cheating the public. I do think that the sentiment that ignoring the output is a necessary assumption of the pro-AA side, or at least hiding it/ignorance of it.

The "meritocracy" side makes this point often and is shouted down by claiming the affirmative action hires are "qualified".

Both groups have reasons why their definition of fairness will not only not harm the purpose of the organization but will enhance its ability to do its job.

It isn't so much ignored as the first thing they needed to provide some answer for.

You're not wrong, but that's natural IMO.

Your job is perhaps the thing that determines most about your life. What job you have is very very important to you in the short, medium and long terms. The outputs of other people's jobs are only important in an indirect and long term manner.

There’s takes of different views of academia, but this is really just an iron law story. The interests of the bureaucracy, determined by proper form, come first, and Gino was advancing the interests of the bureaucracy.

[contemporaneous discussion, more recent]

Caveat: I'm pretty confident that Gino is either guilty as sin or so negligent as to be guilty, and probably both given that she'd signed onto other fraudy-as-fuck research without a care before. A good many of her deflections are not just naked, but often wrong, and those that aren't wrong are meaningless. The lawsuit is, in particular, an indictment of both Gino and her lawyers -- and that the DataColada crew couldn't get legal fees after succeeding an indictment of the courts. Much of her defenders embody of the adage about "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table." and that's a part of it.

So, to be blunt, I'm not a fan.

... but I do notice that she's also unusual, and not in the way I wish she was unusual. Dan Ariely, noted co-author and co-fraud, got a television show, and his sketchy academic behavior is only slightly less obvious. Sam Yoon isn't up a creek until the investigation turns in; it's not hard to list piles of academic misconduct that's just everyday charlatanism, much of which isn't even worth a retraction nevermind direct real punishment. There are other fraudsters that get the hammer, but even there, academia tends to keep the wheel of justice slow, fine, and prone to false negatives: Stapel got got and literally none of his students did, Wansink lost his job and we never even got an answer for what fakes were direct lies rather than p-hacking, yada yada.

It's not enough to say that her fraud is unusual. There are so many rules, and so many ways to do academic misconduct, and so many ways to slice academic misconduct, that it's always possible to explain why one case was vital without lending any predictive power, nor explain why one case was important and the others weren't. And bureaucracies inventing and applying a thicket of rules only to enforce them when desired is absolutely a thing that happens, and something that people like Ackman has seen.

What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.

... which gets rough for 2rafa's take. There's a world where the education and test-taking makes for better decisions, better responses, better actions, and better systems, where elites mean extreme focus in specialized capabilities. There's a world where it's status-farming, or Goodharting, or some very precise games-of-thronesing, where elites are just a class identity for a class that doesn't even pretend to try for its claimed focuses. These worlds aren't even incompatible!

But then you have to run into this world. We're in one where Gino got into, and succeeded at, Harvard for nearly two decades. Dias made it into Harvard and the Time 100 Next before spinning his wheels as one of a dozen lab leaders doing this sort of research on the planet, absolutely wasting it, and another one of those lab leads pretending to replicate part of his tots-real data.

I dunno. I don't want to put words in 2rafa's mouth. If the argument is on whether everything must or should be a status game, I'd agree with you, and find that's not a healthy sort of nihilism to take, and not a healthy reason to want to ignore it all. I don't think that's the position, but if it is, or even if it's a decent read, it's not a good thing.

If the argument is on whether everything is or has become a status game... I'd be stuck having to quibble on the 'everything', and doing so would be a faint defense, or defenders of these approaches to education and academia might feel they have to argue that their output is just better than nothing and I'd have to do the work to believe that. I might be wrong in that pessimism! But I have my reasons, and, thankfully, it's an argument we can have based on facts.

Dan Ariely, noted co-author and co-fraud, got a television show, and his sketchy academic behavior is only slightly less obvious.

Ariely threw Gino under the bus, did he not? Astute, if immoral.

Perhaps. There's a really awkward question about whether he knew, or suspected, or just was in a sufficiently target-rich environment that any finger-pointing would hit a fraudster.

The argument in the example is broadly that grinding tests for 10+ years is a terrible way to determine merit and rewards parental investment / the capacity of the child to suffer / capacity of the parent to make them suffer almost as much as intelligence.

The arguments are twofold:

  1. If it were possible to do a meritocratic sort that was say 95% accurate instead of today’s method being 98% accurate, but this method took 30 minutes instead of 15 years, wouldn’t it be a straightforward improvement from a utilitarian POV in terms of efficiency and reduced suffering?

  2. Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results. Britain performed better, was more agentic, produced more science and engineering through 1750-1950 when universities were the playgrounds of gentlemen (albeit with rigorous marking), we had a large theoretically idle class, and jobs were largely got through patronage and the old boys’ network. This was unfair to many people, yes, but potentially worked better for reasons like (a) there was more slack in the system and fewer resources wasted grinding for maximum-status occupations, (b) talented people were distributed more evenly throughout the system so eg you would have the head nurse in a hospital being about as intelligent as the head doctor because women weren’t allowed to become doctors, which is unfair to the woman in question but makes hospitals run a lot better, and (c) those at the top were somewhat less selected to be grinders and hustlers. It's a bit like the way that hobbyist stuff can be a lot higher quality before something gets popular and all the big companies enshittify it.

There are other arguments against modern meritocracy but those have more to do with whether it makes people happy rather than whether it makes the country perform better, and I figure you’re more interested in the latter.

EDIT:

This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.

Keen to hear more of your thoughts.

95% accurate is pretty horrible. In a country of 348 million that means you have over 17 million people improperly classified.

Point taken, though these are fake numbers in any case and 'properly classified' is not something you can judge with any refinement. More broadly, if you could put in place a program that 'properly' classified 3m more people but required everybody to be whipped every morning, one might conclude it probably wasn't worth it. There are tradeoffs here.

Every measurement has costs. What if we could go from 98% to 99% accurate by having kids grind for 12 hours a day for grades, every day, while doubling public education spending? That would prevent millions more from being misclassified.

Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results.

I think this is key. As I see it, most successful societies historically either had open aristocracies (a small number of exceptionally able outsiders could get in, often by marrying into aristocratic families) or enarchies (my coinage based on the French ENA - the point is that you select down to an aristocracy-sized elite by a single high-stakes exam which is more heavily g-loaded than the modern American meritocratic grind).

"Being from an aristocratic family" is sufficiently g-loaded to select a plausible class of potential elites if the aristocracy is open and not inbred. In the alternative patronage system, so is "sufficiently interesting to attract a patron", providing that patrons actually have to patronise their proteges rather than just writing a note in exchange for a favour from the proteges father (see for example the role of patronage in the Royal Navy when it was the winningest organisation in human history).

I may do an efforpost later on the broader advantages of this approach.

First, to clarify, this seems like agreeing that some idealized meritocratic sorting is actually a good thing, even though modern meritocracy as implemented in western nations isn't (and meritocracy as implemented in South Korea/China is even worse). Unless there's an unspoken justification for a claim like "any attempt to sort by merit will degenerate just as badly"? As far as the topic I was trying to have with this discussion on the "deeper" culture-war relating to cynicism about careers, I'm reading that you agree with me?---that a significant fraction of people have careers that are very positive-sum, producing lots of value for society as a whole. It matters that the people who gets these careers are as qualified as possible to maximize this societal value.

Now, on the (slightly off-topic) general discussion about meritocracy: I think I agree that there are serious problems with modern meritocracy. This is precisely because of examples like Gino---modern meritocracy has serious trouble identifying such strivers (seemingly) focused on career building and accolade collection instead of people actually wanting to accomplish the societally valuable mission of the positions they get (it's still shocking how little shame she displays in her interviews for the damage she did to progress in her field). You want your scientist to be someone good at science, not someone hyperoptimizing test-taking games.

However, there's a big gap between "this has serious problems" and "we need to throw it out" even if "we need to throw it out" comes with an additional "for this alternative". You have to justify the factual claim that the alternative is actually better. For example, while I do agree that 1 is correct, I do not think that "a single IQ test to every child at 10 years old" comes even close to fitting the hypothetical in 1. There are many arguments here, but at the very least you do agree that "You need more than raw intelligence to do good research" is a cliché for a reason? I'm less confident about 2, but I generally think people underestimate just how hard modern science and engineering is compared to what people where doing in the 50's. The sophistication of what we need to do now completely outclasses anything from back then. There's a very good recent pop-science video on EUV lithography that gives a sense of this---Apollo is nothing compared to the engineering problems people needed to solve to get this working!

I also think there are some easy fixes we can make to modern meritocracy, even staying in the framework of "grinding tests". First of all, the tests can be made much more interesting and less based on rote memorization---grinding for challenging IMO/other olympiad-style problems is much more fun then grinding for the SAT. It's also a much more accurate test of actual interest and creativity. Of course, as anyone who actually did grind for such tests can tell you, even this can both be miserable and get goodhearted if taken to an extreme. The solution there is to have a variety of "tests" in very different formats---olympiads, debate tournaments, science fairs, take-home tests, even on-the-spot jeopardy-style contests, etc.---so many that you can't grind for all of them. Meritocratic sorting could be based on performance on some sort of "top-n" of all the possible tests. The optimal strategy then is to do the ones you're most interested in and the variety of needing to be good multiple very different formats keeps it from getting too miserable. This is just some off-the-cuff speculating right now just to give a vague idea of how the details might work.

Sorry for not fully explaining all the points here, it's pretty late where I am right now---I can expand more tomorrow evening on parts that seem sketchy.

When the Gino case broke out: “Mr. President—a second exposé of academic fraud has hit a female HBS professor.”

The first being Amy Cuddy and her power poses a few years earlier. This was framed as some stupid men and traitorous pickmes being misogynistic tightasses about “replicability” and “selection bias,” oppressing a brave female professor from living her best life and sharing her Emotional Truth, so Cuddy could still save some face and salvage some plausible deniability.

Then Francesca Gino came around and was like “hold my cosmo.” She took it to a next level by just straight-up falsifying the data. This passage from Wikipedia is a classic:

According to the report, Gino offered two explanations for the signs of data tampering: either that this was an honest mistake by her or her research assistants, or that "someone who had access to her computer, online data-storage account, and/or data files" tampered with her data out of malice, naming one of her coauthors in one of the since-retracted papers as the most likely suspect.

It reminds me of when Pycelle tries to blame Varys upon Tyrion’s confrontation: “No! Never! It's a falsehood! I swear it! It wasn't me! Ah, Varys. It was Varys, the coauthoorrrr!”

If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated.

This reads a lot like the defense of that Christian college student refuting pro-trans arguments. Here on the Motte there was lots of "Her arguments are bad but a score of zero? The teacher is treating her differently, more harshly."

People here posted the actual grading rubric and went through how this wasn't a zero given a reasonable interpretation of the grading guide.

There's a pretty big difference between actual novel research and some random busywork essay task for undergraduates. Especially since the former shouldn't just be composed to hit a KPI whilst the latter explicitly is.

Ugh, fine, I didn't read the essay at the time but I did now.

The question is whether the essay, which was bad, was bad enough to earn a 0/25 rather than a higher-but-still-low score like, I dunno, 2/25 or 5/25. "The soft sciences are sufficiently corrupted by ideology that their politically-relevant outputs should asymptote to a low level of Bayesian evidence" is a highly-plausible and highly-relevant proposition to discussing any research article that's come out of them, and she did hint at it; that's better than literally nothing. Grading does need to discriminate between different degrees of badness, after all, and in this specific case we have proof that the instructor was marking down due to taking personal offence at the positions taken:

“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”

The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.

(AP, emphasis mine)

I will note that, regardless of your opinion of the essay's quality, "writing a bad essay" is not a moral failure in the way that, say, plagiarism would be (even though plagiarism is not actually a crime)... or in the way that scientific fraud is. I'm not actually sure whether this is literally fraud in the legal sense; I don't know whether "you agree to not tamper with your data" was part of the contract to receive a research grant ("you agree to actually do the study" presumably is, but the study does appear to have been performed in all these cases). Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that a university that allows its scientists to tamper with data would stop getting government grants in a hurry (because, well, the actual state interest in issuing research grants is to uncover scientific truths, not to produce papers full of literal lies; there are of course private funders who want to buy propaganda, but the state shouldn't be doing that) and thus it is reasonable for a university (at least, one that intends to continue performing government-funded research) to fire scientists that have repeatedly performed such tampering (and thus ensure that they don't do more of it).

There's not much point in trying to (retroactively) change a grading rubric and the paper's score so that the actual outcome, your preferred outcome, and the procedurally-fair outcome all match. As a result, practically nobody had that broad of a conversation.

There is a point to setting scientific research standards and Harvard's employees, so that the actual/preferred/fair outcomes all match (in the future, at least).

Also, getting a zero for a substandard paper is wrong, and getting fired for academic fraud is right. We should be keeping different halves of the double standards from those examples.

Here on the Motte there was lots of "Her arguments are bad but a score of zero? The teacher is treating her differently, more harshly."

I noticed the same and have absolutely no sympathy for that viewpoint, to the extent that I think anyone advocating for it is some combination of idiot and actively malicious.

You don't believe that random busywork essay tasks for undergrads are marked via rubric?

"Heh, I compare two incidents that have superficially similar argumentations around one another and so once again I accuse the chuds of hypocrisy, gotcha!"

Go directly to Reddit. Do not pass go, do not collect 200$. There is a world apart between making rhetorically weak arguments and fabricating evidence whole cloth. You know this. But here you are, saying something incredibly foolish, to attempt to reignite a past argument that you had failed to persuade in.

You are shameless, that much I know, but you can try to at least not be stupid at the same time. Now, having bitten into this bait, I will spit it out and go on my way.

You've been warned and banned many times for personal attacks. For someone using "reddit" as an epithet, you are acting like a redditor.

One week ban.

There is a world apart between making rhetorically weak arguments and fabricating evidence whole cloth.

There is also a world apart between a zero on a single assignment which is 10% of a single course grade and firing a tenured academic in disgrace. Both would be the appropriate punishments in a sane academia for the respective crimes, but are enforced far too rarely.

In both cases, the argument being made is of the form "A fundamentally righteous but rarely-enforced rule was enforced against an obviously-guilty member of a protected group - and discrimination by selective enforcement is worse than the underlying crime" (and the scissor is "Given the history of malign discrimination and current underrepresentation, should conservatives in academia be a protected group?"). The structure is symmetric, even if the relative severity is not.

A fundamentally righteous but rarely-enforced rule was enforced against an obviously-guilty member of a protected group

This is the similarity you're failing to show between the cases. As per the other thread the grading criteria for the assignment do not warrant a 0. Yes, it's a bad essay, but the criteria provided by the professor explicitly allows bad essays. Please show how there were similar rules that actually allow for the penalized conduct in this case.

The essay deserved an F (that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others). Some of us think that grading rubrics giving F-quality work D and C grades in order to avoid giving earned Fs to protected groups are precisely what's gone wrong with higher education. When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.

The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.

Your argument about this paper deserving an F is sufficient in a vacuum. However, this did not occur in a vacuum. It was one of many papers, and all prior papers written by this person were graded very generously. Once that pattern is established, a sudden zero requires justification beyond “this paper was bad.” There could've been some plausible deniability had the trans TA given a high F and kept the criticism solely about the paper not adhering to the rubric. The trans TA didn't do that. They gave the paper the lowest grade possible, then wrote a lengthy redditor debate style response directly to Fulnecky denying her appeal, which included how they were offended. That diminishes plausible deniability quite substantially.

Even if that essay did deserve an F per the rubric, then what should be done with all other generously graded essays in that course under said rubric? Fulnecky received full credit on all prior essays in that series of assignments. I'd be willing to bet that her writing quality on this controversial paper was not exceptionally worse than her other papers, or even other papers written by other students in that class. The university's own internal review seems to support that, and the lack of consistency is the most damning bit of evidence that the TA cannot account for.

Fundamentally, I don't care about Fulnecky's cause as much as I do about the culture establishing a counter balance to progressive overreach. This TA receiving a punishment of this severity is worth it in that regard. Not because their crime was severe, but because similar crimes of this nature occur everyday on nearly every campus in the country. I do not want progressive thumbs tipping the scales without fear of repercussion any longer.

(that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others)

What's bizarre about it? <=50% points is a failing grade in every European country I've been in.

The essay deserved an F

Not according to the grading criteria for the assignment. And if yes, just barely.

The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.

What's the evidence that this rule even exists? I can probably pull out a specific rule for the school that prohibits academic fraud, if you admit there isn't one here, you're admitting the cases aren't analogous.

When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.

Most motteposters are in favor of high standards. Failing a particular student a teacher doesn't like, but otherwise keeping the low standards isn't particularly popular.

Failing a particular student a teacher doesn't like, but otherwise keeping the low standards isn't particularly popular.

I don't think it's crazy to think that there is a very meaningful distinction between "your rules" and "your rules, applied fairly". Fairness is probably the most important claimed value of both sides of the culture war anyway, there is just disagreement on its interpretation.

I can also entertain the separate thought that standards should be more rigorous, but my elitist sensibilities there there would probably nix a decent chunk of the psychology department's courses as a whole: reading between the likes here suggests to me that "lifespan development" was broadly seen as an easy class and I'd bet half the essays are worse but scored well still.

"Her arguments are bad but a score of zero? The teacher is treating her differently, more harshly."

No, people on the Motte said "Her arguments are bad, but according to the published grading rubric there's no way it deserved a zero"

Yea? Ok.

  • -23

Do you not see any difference between that argument and your strawman of it?

It's not what I remember the argument being here. I recall people here saying an equally shitty form of argument coming to pro-trans conclusions wouldn't have gotten a zero. In any case, in both cases the goal posts are moved away or toward the solidity or veracity of the argument made and away or toward "but given procedural conditions and norms that surround the argument-making, she's being singled out."

  • -14

I believe her paper was singled out because of its content.

  • The paper was critical of progressive gender ideology.
  • The transgender TA who graded the paper provided a lengthy explanation justifying the zero, stating it did not satisfy the requirements laid out by the rubric. They also mentioned it was offensive in their explanation. The TA refused to adjust the grade.
  • Fulnecky claimed in an interview that she received 100% on all other papers in this series and that she didn't change her writing style for this paper.
  • Fulnecky also mentioned that this was the first paper that touched on gender, and that it was the first time she mentioned anything about her religion or the bible.

Based on the information above, it was already reasonable to assume that this paper was graded with extra scrutiny because of the topic and the grader's identity.

Then the university reviewed case and decided the TAs grading was arbitrary. The provost agreed with this conclusion.

What do you disagree with here?

Likewise if the same thing had happened 5 years ago where a mostly off-topic pro-trans argument was submitted to a conservative TA and given a 0, that TA would have been loaded into a cannon and shot into the sun.

It's not what I remember the argument being here.

Cool, I can't wait to make you defend an argument you never made, because that's how I "remembered" it.


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