site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

12
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This video is very interesting to me, in the sense that it does not resonate with my experience, at least of my own internal life, at all. I think I’ve made allusions before to the fact that I tend to recognize within myself many patterns and frames of mind that are generally associated with femininity; my free testosterone levels have certainly increased over the years and I’ve observed a concomitant decrease in the prevalence of these patterns, but I still seem to experience them far more often than the modal heterosexual man. This is why I’ve always held out a bit more sympathy for a soft version of the “gender is a non-binary spectrum separate from sex” cluster of ideas than one might expect, given my opinions about many other culture-war topics.

I think it is very obvious that masculinity and femininity are bimodal distributions; in that sense, I’m certainly in strong disagreement with the full gender abolitionists and gender-sex-separators. Where I think a lot of the more fertile disagreement lies is the question of just how many people sit somewhere in the psychological overlap between those distributions, and what to do with them. I’m completely uninterested in entertaining discussions of what to do about the vanishingly small number of people who are physically intermediate between the two poles, but as someone in the awkward position of finding myself psychologically somewhere in the undifferentiated middle ground, it’s odd watching a video which clearly the vast majority of people find insightful and relatable and getting pretty much nothing out of it myself.

As a male (but not an especially masculine one), this is also very much not my experience, but I notice that most of the men I know also don't seem to have this either, even ones who are more masculine than me in general. So clearly something is wrong here. I only know my own experiences, and I don't ever think about literally nothing. I don't know what that even means, other than being unconscious. But I don't think it matches most of the men I know, so I'm mostly just extrapolating from there. It's probably not true, and if it's is true for some men it's probably not true of people who I encounter in my filter bubble. I'm torn between three possible hypotheses. In approximate order of how likely I think they are:

1: This is a made up stereotype based on conversation preferences. Nobody really experiences nothing in their mind, they just daydream about unimportant stuff and then when asked about it either lose their train of thought and forget, or are embarrassed by how silly it was. It's easier to tell your wife that you were thinking about "nothing" than it is to tell her you were imagining the broader ecological implications if squirrels didn't have tails, or that you were trying to find symmetries in the patterns on the wall, and then have her judge you and ask questions about what's wrong with you that you'd think about something silly like that. Or if you were imagining having a threesome with two of your favorite celebrities, and you think she'd get angry if you admitted something like that. It's entirely possible that enough men (not all men, but a non-negligible number) have negative experiences with women questioning their inner thoughts and starting conflicts over it, or they just don't enjoy having conversations when they're trying to have alone time to think, and they learn to say "nothing" as the easiest response. And if enough do this, and men do this more often then women, then it becomes a stereotype.

2: This is an intelligence thing, not a gender thing. Maybe people with IQ below a certain threshold really do space out and think about nothing sometimes. I suspect if you were thinking about literally nothing you'd be trapped there forever, you have to have some sort of route for external stimulus to reach your brain, but I suppose your conscious mind could be off while your unconscious is still on. Or more likely they're thinking about very little which gets rounded off to "nothing" when queried. This is pretty far from my experience, I suppose the closest I can think of is when I'm really sleepy and my thoughts seem to slow and get muddled. Maybe some people do this on purpose as a sort of micronap? I don't know. If this is the correct explanation, then I can think of two possibilities for why this is stereotyped as a gender thing. One possibility is that it is socially uncouth to criticize women in certain ways, especially about their intelligence, so if men and women both do this men who talk about women doing this will be criticized for being misogynistic, while women who talk about men doing this will be sympathized with. The other possibility is the male variability hypothesis. If this only occurs in people with IQ below 90, and men have higher IQ variance, then more men will have this feature, therefore the stereotype might get applied to men more. It could even be the case that there is a genuine gender component to this in combination with the IQ thing. Like, maybe it only happens to women with IQ less than 80 and men with IQ less than 90, so some couples with the same IQ might see differences across gender. Heck, it could even be the case that it never happens to women, and happens to all men with IQ less than 90, and it would still be consistent with lots of men in general having it, while none of the men you or I interact with have it.

3: This is a genuine gender thing. Some sort of hormone or brain structure or socially nurtured psychological patterns cause some men to sometimes think about nothing. That is, there is a common causal source (other than IQ) of many correlated masculine traits, and empty brain. The stereotypes are right, even if not universal, and you and I are just less masculine than all of the meatheads out there. Maybe I'm wrong about the inner worlds of the intelligent but not feminine men around me, and they do sometimes think about literally nothing, just not when they're around me. That seems vaguely plausible, if you actually pay attention while you're at work and socializing and save your sitting around thinking about nothing when you're alone at home.

Again, I think 1 is the most likely, then 2, then 3. But I suppose any are possible.

I am personally of the “it’s not stuff they’d actually want to remember thinking about, so they forget about their thoughts” camp. Maybe I’m an outlier here, but I can’t ge5 my brain to shut up most of the time. And unless I’m thinking about something specific, it’s generally inane stupid shit that I don’t even care about. Like, it’s pieces of tv shows, do the Cards play this afternoon, songs, what’s the word for X in Y language, what would be different if the Chinese had discovered the New World instead of the Spanish?

I don’t talk about it because it’s kinda weird and nobody would actually care that much.

3.5: This is a head injury thing, and stereotypical masculine activities are more likely to result in head injuries.

I hadn't thought of that. I'm doubtful that this is the main cause, because this would still be pretty rare even in men, and I'm not sure that would be enough to create the stereotype. But it could be this.

It may be rare in men as a whole, but still common enough in some notable subsets of men (eg, athletes in certain popular sports) to create the stereotype.

It is funny you mention “finding symmetry in the patterns on the wall.” I do trivial stuff like that all of the time (including whenever I see numbers try to figure out how using different mathematical functions get to the number 1)

I do that with words, when I see a new word or phrase I immediately try to find anagrams, cyphers, puns, spoonerisms or see if I can figure out the etymology in my head.