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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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Part of the issue is you only see the stories that are bad in the news and not the day to day life.

Night life of course becomes co-ed, but during the day and week it’s mostly men.

I think my school did it better where we had dorms that were male or female and you were required to stay 3 years and about 40% stayed all 4 years. They still did a lot of frat type things like organizing dances and events. I think it’s better because the assignment were random so you didn’t have only the cool kids in one frat and then lower ranked frats. Model wise I think this is better. And even Seniors who moved off campus would interact with the dorm they had gone to.

Hazing is stupid. But that’s a small part of frats and I don’t think all even do it.

Is hazing stupid or is it bonding?

The underlying psychology of hazing is likely to mimic an aspect of war. Basically training for war and we have a real evolutionary advantage for soldiers to feel brotherhood with their fellow soldiers. Sometimes in war it’s advantageous for a soldier to do things bad for their own health that benefits the group.

Therefore going thru painful hazing with your new frat friends helps you develop a feeling of being “brothers” or basically family from going thru the experience together.

I would still say it’s mostly stupid in the modern context…….but things usually don’t exists unless they fulfill a real benefit.

Stupid. Idk where but I remember studies show that group cohesion and performance is lower in groups with hazing versus not.

Intuitively there is some idea that hazing puts everyone through a common hardship that people can share, and this probably drives self reported claims of benefits from hazing, but honestly I think it's just cope and also rationalism of I got mine so you aren't getting a free pas sort of mentality.

Far better than hazing is just, you know, working together to complete some task or just doing activities together.

I trust studies very little

Yes sociology studies have mostly proven to have limited value. My guess is because p-hacking is easy and publish or perish in academia is largely true so you have intense pressure to do some p-hacking and writing commentary that sounds truish. With 10’s of thousands of social science academics there just aren’t enough new true things to discover.